WHY THE ARTICLE EXISTS TO BEGIN WITH:

A few regional artist friends and I got together in 2012 to create something ignorant together—RKFDNEWS.com—a website loaded with stories about one special place on earth called Rockford, Illinois.  We aimed to poke social buttons, to create reactions—and that we did with ease.  This social experiment was successful on a local level with regards to people loving what we were doing, or avoiding it like the plague by cursing our names every chance they got when figuring out who was behind its private, 24/7, digital troll-like presentation. We created a loud reaction, and that is what some artists should aim to do.  We did.

The public reaction became a punchline for our collective’s final goal:  A 256 page book was published in late 2014, “Believe,” under the collaborative name of RKFDnews. It’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and elsewhere.

Sarah Wolf‘s drunk and biased editors at the Rockford Register Star, the region’s largest newspaper (which is operating without an experienced trusted journalistic staff after laying off nearly everyone to hire amateur content creators at poverty level hourly wages to keep up with the digital wasteland we all live in), intentionally cut out details from her original piece noting the existence of a book we published (late 2014) when this press article was published (Jan. 2017).

Despite the RRStars’ editors’ biased, intentional slights, Sarah did a great job conveying our collective’s intents versus that of what the national trend for fake news had become after the ridiculous 2016 Presidential Election, which as of 2023, the nation is still reeling from thanks to Donnie Trump and he and his insiders’ manipulative marketing tactics to promote lies—and—fake news. That election and everything that has happened since with fake news and social media proves how dangerously far ahead of the pulse of the nation our little f*ck up art collective was from 2012 to 2016 by targeting a small region with absurd internet content to challenge what they’re seeing, reading, and believing through garbage social media platforms.

Fools, peasants and patriots, fried chicken, potatoes and soups for everyone!

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