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Uprising

Page 19

by Diamond


  Exactly.

  We didn’t deny anyone an interview. If you wanted an interview and wanted to hear what we thought or what we were thinking, we granted an interview. We’re disgusted with CNN and Don Lemon now. The disparaging comments that he’s made about our president show a disrespect for the office of the president and a pandering to the liberal narrative. I never watch him anymore because journalism isn’t about being biased; it’s about being impartial.

  That’s right.

  Well, Don Lemon wasn’t being fair that night, but he restrained himself just enough so that we couldn’t quite pinpoint the real intent, the stunt, the games he was playing with us.

  That’s right.

  After we did that interview, y’all, the hate ramped up again.

  Yes, it did.

  We got so much flak on social media; people were asking why they had us on television. They were giving their spiel about not liking what we were talking about.

  I call that the Mob. Whenever they see something on TV saying something that they disagree with, the Mob comes in and has to demonstrate their outrage. What we basically heard was, “Why do you have them on your station? They’re this; they’re that. We don’t want to hear them. Blah, blah, blah…”

  The way I saw it, the troll farm came out, and they started bashing Diamond and Silk because we were thinking another way. We were telling it to you from a different perspective, different from the way the fake news media had been spinning the narrative.

  Mm-hmm. And it wasn’t just CNN, it was all of the left-leaning liberal media.

  I felt they were coming at us like, “Who do you think you are?”

  Mm-hmm. Another thing to remember, too, is with us being black and still Democrats in 2015, our stumping for Trump really looked odd to them.

  We were unique.

  They called us “the Stump for Trump Girls.”

  Yes, they did.

  My distinct impression was that they were trying to make us seem like we didn’t know what, or who, we were talking about—like we were just in this fog.

  Mm-hmm. They were going to try to show us up, but we showed them up because I remember letting Don Lemon know before the show began that we could no longer vote for a system that kept handing us crumbs. We have our own minds; we can think for ourselves; we don’t need anyone spoon-feeding us a narrative.

  That’s right. I can feed my own self.

  That’s a popular phrase today, but Diamond and Silk said it first. “We have our own minds; we can think for ourselves.”

  And after that particular interview, that was that. We continued stumping for Trump.

  Roland Martin

  Remember when we first had to go on with Roland Martin?

  Yes, I remember.

  We weren’t afraid of Roland Martin. Evidently, he must’ve been afraid of us.

  Mm-hmm.

  He must’ve been afraid of our power, our blackness, and our realness.

  Right. We were asked to be on with Roland Martin, and we didn’t have a problem with being on his show.

  Mm-hmm.

  Come to find out, the first thing that the Left, especially black people on the Left, wanted to do was try to make us look unknowledgeable and try to make themselves appear to be more intelligent, enlightened, and politically correct.

  Mm-hmm.

  He tried hard to make us look ignorant and unlearned.

  Right. So what we did was make him look ignorant and unlearned.

  Let me just say this: You know, the interviews with Roland Martin were very challenging for me. When I heard the foolishness coming out of his mouth about how all black folks are supposed to vote one way, I wanted to cuss him out.

  Mm-hmm. Me too.

  He reminded me of a black man who’s still trying to hold on to a bag of beans and a slab of fatback meat. That type of man doesn’t want to give up the bag of beans and slab of fatback meat for something bigger and better. He was disparaging two black women because we didn’t want to hold on to past Democrat promises they never intended to fulfill. We knew we could have more than just fatback; we could have a whole prime rib.

  That’s right. Why wait on the Democrat crumbs to make a crumb cake when we can have all the ingredients to make our own cake?

  Roland Martin didn’t like that. It seems as though people like Roland Martin want to follow Willie Lynch’s example of dividing black people: you put the light-skinned people in the house; you work the darker-skinned people in the fields; and you incite them to dishonesty and distrust for each other.

  Right.

  See, Roland Martin was just upset because he was “in the house”—on television—and Diamond and Silk were supposed to be in the damn field, but because of our influence in politics, we were surpassing him.

  It felt like he was trying to keep us in our place or dim our light.

  That’s exactly what he was trying to do. What I don’t understand is how, as a black man, you can disrespect black women. You’re married to a black woman, or your mother is a black woman… I didn’t understand that.

  That’s right. I don’t understand it either.

  The real problem was that we were able to grow our platform faster than Roland Martin could grow his. A lot of his antics and the disparaging talk that came out of his mouth stemmed from pure envy and jealousy, in my opinion.

  That’s right, it was. It really was. His technique was to talk over us, ask questions without allowing us the opportunity to answer them, then put us in a category. He mentioned something about someone on the Trump team giving an interview to a white supremacist.

  Let me tell you what happened with that: one of the Trump team members unknowingly snapped a photo with or made a comment to someone that the left-wing media put into one of their evil categories. This was all part of the media’s game. Remember, we still thought journalism was a profession of integrity and that our words would be conveyed accurately.

  We weren’t looking at where you grew up, your age, your background, what your religious orientation was; we didn’t ask the people who interviewed us those questions. You want to do an interview about the election? Let me tell you about Donald J. Trump. That’s what our position was and still is.

  Mm-hmm.

  As far as, “Oh, we better not do this interview; we better not do that interview,” how is it that we’ve got to be cautious about who we do an interview with, but other people can do an interview with whomever they choose to and not be condemned for it?

  That’s right.

  Anytime we would go on with Roland Martin, his ratings would go up.

  And the videos would go viral. He actually kept our first interview with him pinned to the top of his page, and it’s probably the most views that he’s ever had on one of his videos.

  Yes. When we noticed how Roland Martin was trying to use us, we stopped doing interviews with him because I didn’t want to lose my cool. I remember when we were at the Republican National Convention and we had to do an interview with Roland Martin, and I went the hell off on him.

  Mm-hmm. Yes, you sure did.

  And I think that was the last interview because I refuse to allow anyone to intentionally agitate me to the point that I just want to go off. I mean, I was all up in his face.

  “In his face” is an understatement.

  How dare he, as a black man, tell me I can’t think outside the box? Just because he feels like he’s the one in the big house doesn’t mean we’ve got to be out here with the field Negroes doing what the gatekeepers want us to do.

  Hell to the no.

  Tom Joyner and Russ Parr

  When we interviewed with Tom Joyner and Russ Parr, it felt like they wanted us to remain Democrats and were trying to scold us for thinking outside of the box, for seeing things from a different perspective.

  That’s right.

  It’s like they were the trap setters, trying to keep the black communities trapped in the same box that the Democrats built for them.

&n
bsp; That’s right.

  Well, we did The Russ Parr Morning Show several times. At first, he seemed like he just wanted to play. Well, if you want to play, I’m going to show you how it’s done. We were relentless in declaring the great things that Donald J. Trump was going to do for this country.

  Mm-hmm.

  We stopped doing interviews with Russ Parr because he was acting passive-aggressive with us.

  That’s right. What they try to do is degrade you and make you seem as though you’re ignorant. He would nicely invite us on, then try to verbally attack us in the end.

  In a very condescending way.

  But it doesn’t take somebody with a Ph.D. to know that something was not going right in this country: We had just had a biracial man, who identified as a black man, running this country for eight years. He ran it into the ground, and nothing significant happened for black folks.

  That’s right. We weren’t afraid to call it out. When we went on Tom Joyner, we gave him his accolades—because we’d listened to him for years—then we went ahead and shut that show down.

  Hahaha. That’s what we did.

  Tom Joyner and Jacque Reid tried to lay traps for us, trying to get us to criticize Trump and asking us whether we were going to stay in the public eye if Donald Trump lost the election—which they were sure he would. But we had an answer for everything, and there was nothing else that they could say. See, when they knew that we were very powerful in what we were saying and that they couldn’t shut us down, they didn’t know how to take us.

  Right.

  Blog Wars

  So what the media bloggers would do, y’all, was write the most salacious, nasty, disparaging, disrespectful-style stories about Diamond and Silk.

  It was disgusting.

  It was deliberate too. They wanted black viewers, especially, to see us as tainted so they wouldn’t regard us as valid. See, some black people will follow whatever the leaders say, even if the leader’s message is, “We’re still down in a box; ain’t got a pot to piss in or window to throw it out of.”

  Right.

  Back in the day when they set up programs to give away free cheese, the main group of people that showed up were black folks. You have to remember that people were conditioned to think that they needed the slave master to take care of them.

  That’s right.

  Well, Diamond and Silk were changing minds, and we knew how to change minds by getting people to see the facts.

  Let’s get out of a fantasy; let’s look at the facts here.

  Here are the facts: Until Donald J. Trump, nothing had changed for black America. If you want to talk about Obamacare—okay—what we got was a lot of Obama without any of the care. He didn’t move the needle. It felt like he stuck us in the eye with the needle, trying to blind us from his true agenda of how he was going to fundamentally transform America.

  That’s right. I recall interviews with people calling Donald Trump a liar. One time, Diamond said, “Oh, let me get you straight. My president is not a liar.”

  That’s right.

  And the way they edit those videos… you may speak to someone for twenty minutes, and they chop up the video and put a negative spin around the interview to fit their narrative, then publish it. So the listeners don’t really get to hear the comeback from any negative questions that they may have asked.

  Don’t you worry, though, Diamond and Silk always shut it down.

  That’s right. We weren’t afraid, and when they saw we weren’t afraid, there was nothing that they could do. When they can’t intimidate you, they actually become fearful of you. Then, of course, they smear you because they fear you.

  That’s right.

  We notice when some black bloggers from the Left write about us, they typically call us derogatory names.

  People tell us, “Your ancestors are rolling and turning over in their graves.”

  Our ancestors are rolling and turning over in their graves when they see people like Roland Martin calling black women out of their names. (In case you’re not familiar with that expression, it means that a lot of black male celebrities were calling us insulting and racist slurs instead of having the basic decency and respect to refer to us by our names.)

  Yes. We had Montel Williams, D. L. Hughley, Rickey Smiley, and, of course, Roland Martin, all of whom are black men, bashing us and calling us out of our names. I’m like, what’s up with these black men calling black women out of their names?

  Some of these men we used to look up to because we grew up watching them on television, especially when it came to Montel Williams. You know, I was shocked when we got the first tweet from him, and he said we were just wanna-be reality TV stars.

  Montel Williams said that, right.

  How dare he think that the only thing black women can be are reality television stars.

  That’s right.

  As a black man, he didn’t think we could be better than reality TV stars running around, beating up on each other, and drinking alcohol until we’re stupid? It didn’t occur to him that maybe we were two black women speaking change and causing something great to happen in our communities and in this country? All he saw were reality TV stars?

  Well, shame on him, but it ain’t no shame on us. They tried to bash us, to smother our opinion, to make us feel and seem less than. They thought that was going to stop us, and they were dead wrong about it.

  It only revved us up even more. When I see any man trying to stop a woman’s progress, it lets me know he’s weak. Besides, we weren’t going to allow any man, especially our black brothers, to think it was okay to disrespect us.

  You got that right.

  We had no problem with getting them straight and keeping them straight.

  Just to know what people’s true intentions were made us even wiser to the game.

  Absolutely. You are right, Silk; it made us wiser to the game.

  Listen, we get interview requests all the time where people want to follow us around to see what we’re doing. Most of them we don’t even respond to. If we do respond to them, it’s a “Hell, no.”

  Because we already know they’re not going to talk about the facts, and they’re not going to air what we talk about. They want to cut pieces and segments and put them together to make us look bad and fit their own narrative. That’s not journalism; that’s defamation.

  Right. They love to slice and dice.

  So this is how the left-wing media treats those with powerful voices that don’t fit their narrative. If we didn’t have powerful voices, they wouldn’t have gone to such effort to cut up our words in order to make us look undesirable.

  Right. They love to dredge up the past and make it appear like it’s happening right now, especially if there’s any type of indiscretion or something that can be spun as indiscreet. Then they use that against you to make it appear like that is who you are right now. They have a habit of doing that to Donald Trump, to us, and to anyone who openly supports him.

  So it was like being asleep but awakening to this game that the media loves to play. They deliberately mislead to make it appear that things are one way when it’s really a flat-out lie.

  That’s the truth. All a lie.

  They love to hoodwink and do what’s called a fifty-two fake out.

  Right.

  So when Donald Trump started calling them “the fake news,” I turned around and called them “the very fake news.” They were fake as hell because they tried to make things appear a particular way to fit the narrative that they were trying to spew out on the American people.

  That’s right. Not only are they fake news, but they are the enemy of people and the enemy of the truth. Don’t believe the hype when you see some of these interviews. A lot of the detail is cut.

  Dissected, cut, and edited. I’m the editor when it comes down to chopping up our videos and getting everything out there correctly, so I can tell when something has been edited. They can take your head and put it on someone else’s body. Th
ey can make it seem like you’re speaking from someone else’s voice. There are a lot of alterations that can be done when it comes to editing in these different programs.

  Mm-hmm.

  They edited our interviews to continue their plot because we went against the grain.

  Chapter 14 Unsafe to the Community

  On December 4, 2015, when we first met candidate Donald Trump, he stated that we had become an Internet sensation. Thereafter, we were known as “Internet Sensations Diamond and Silk.” We had taken the Internet by storm. Even though we didn’t know much about what we were doing, we did the best with the little knowledge we had.

  After doing several media hits, we realized that no matter how often we went on TV, the left-wing media’s main agenda was to oppose us. They spun a different adverse narrative every day, and they tried to pigeonhole us into whatever negativity was popular at the time of our interview.

  Mm-hmm.

  We paid close attention and replied back quickly with answers that blew their stereotypical narrative slam out of the water. We stayed ready, so we wouldn’t have to get ready.

  When they tried to trick us or ask us a dumb question, they got an in-your-face response. We didn’t play with the media. We called it how we saw it, without sugarcoating it. A lot of our interviews would garner millions of views. We were able to sway people by our way of resonating with the viewer, and the media did not like that. We were taken out of the media because we were successful in making them all look foolish. No one could outtalk Diamond and Silk, no matter how many journalistic degrees they had.

  We used social media to get our message across. Not only did we use it, we mastered it. The platforms began to grow expeditiously. There were more than a thousand people a day following us on Facebook and Twitter. YouTube was much, much slower building followers. We found out why later on.

  People were hearing our message, and they would complain when we didn’t drop content within the next week’s time frame. We pushed the Ditch and Switch Now campaign and later found out that thousands upon thousands were paying attention. They were ditching and switching.

  Yes, they were. People wanted us to do a video every single day. They thanked us for being their voices. Because of prior obligations, we were unable to do a video every day, but we made sure that one was out every week.

 

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