Flagrant Donald Trump supporters Diamond and Silk fervently backed the second amendment during the annual National Rifle Association forum Friday and they have some bold claims about Black people, the Democratic Party and gun ownership.
After Diamond declared “we will never lift our arms up to surrender our guns to nobody,” she later proclaimed:
“If the left want to talk about something, how about talking about the Democratic Party,” she said to boos from the Republican crowd at the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum. “And how they wanted to not end slavery but keep slavery. And it was the NRA that helped our ancestors to protect themselves from the Democratic Party. If they wanna march against something, how about marching against the Democratic Party who created the KKK and Jim Crow days. I thank God because it was the NRA that helped my ancestors protect and defend themselves.”
Yet despite enthusiastic applause from the crowd, according to Politifact, the NRA was not founded to help freed enslaved Blacks protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan. The closest thing to supporting Diamond’s claim is an event recounted in the documentary, “Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power.”
It said civil rights leader Robert F. Williams took over leadership of the NAACP, which had been on the cusp of folding because of the KKK. Then, Williams applied for a charter from the NRA and established the Black Guard, an armed group dedicated to protecting Black people. However, Williams’ widow, her husband changed the job titles of the NAACP members when they applied for the charter, so it’s not clear if the NRA gave the group any help.
Additionally, the Democratic Party in the Jim Crow era, was not the Democratic Party of today.
Still, that’s a different story than the one Diamond espoused. But that didn’t stop her from continuing to rail against Democrats, even mentioning self-proclaimed free-thinker and fellow Trump supporter Kanye West.
Diamond said West has only voiced what they’ve been saying since 2015 about getting off the “Democratic plantation.”
“You see Kanye West saying we can think for ourselves. And Diamond and Silk used to say ‘We don’t need you spoon feeding us a narrative.’ We can feed ourselves!” she says at the 4:56 mark. “I keep hearing people talk about a revolution but the revolution started back in 2015 when Diamond and Silk told everybody, ‘You got to come off that Democratic plantation!’ … So what you’re seeing, you all, is evolution where people are evolving. They’re changing their mindsets, they’re thinking about things a little different. They don’t have to have a slave mentality anymore. They know that they can work off of that Democratic plantation! … Let’s vote for something different!”
In response, several people bashed the duo’s misunderstanding of history.
“So you just proved to us that Diamond, Silk, AND the NRA have never bothered to pick up a history book past the 2nd grade. Congrats?” someone tweeted.
“Really? The Civil War ended in 1865,” another said. “The NRA was founded in 1871. Darn those pesky dates, amirite?”
— StopHimNow (@Saintsfan5348) May 6, 2018
