About Perfidy Press
Perfidy Press in partnership with Gatekeeper Press is a boutique publisher dedicated to upsetting corporate and political apple carts. It’s a small press—so small, in fact, that it would fit in our coat closet. But that doesn’t mean its words aren’t mighty. We tell truths to power with information and interpretations you won’t find on the 6PM news. Our imprint’s name should not imply that we are deceitful, unfaithful, untrustworthy, treacherous, or any such synonym. (Read our take on perfidy here.) Rather, we are all about exposing endemic perfidy in political economy, technology, and news media. We have dedicated ourselves to telling oft-suppressed inconvenient truths one needs to know to function as a citizen.
And speaking of news, Geoffrey Dutton’s novel Turkey Shoot received the 2019 Courage in Fiction award from Independent Publishers of New England. This one-of-a-kind conspiracy thriller was inspired by the plight and pluck of war refugees who famously floated to Europe in the summer of 2015, only to be greeted with contempt and suspicion by politicians and pundits, including some of those who displaced them by launching ill-conceived disastrous military adventures.
Geoff, our factotum, is a likeable enough chap. You would never know from his middle-class origins and Ivy League education that he hates America. Not its land, people, or civic institutions, but for pretending to be a democracy when its elections are fraudulent and its top politicians are rented out by corporate elites uninterested in governance that is not to their benefit. They and their corporate enablers have crippled government institutions intended to serve the people by diverting the commonweal to warfare and corporate welfare.
What we the people are being served with are mythical free markets, phony rugged individualism, and American exceptionalism propagated by right-wing mouthpieces. Many of my countrymen have been so brainwashed that they can no longer think straight about what is in the public interest. So ill-informed about the world have Americans become that that too many couldn’t locate more than three or four countries on a world map. The news media and many school systems avoid treading too close to America’s history of perfidious wars, slavery, subjugation of women and Native Americans, and white privilege and nationalism. Instead, they keep us preoccupied with celebrities, sports, entertainment, and consumer products that most don’t need and many can’t afford.
Geoff wants to make America great again by unmasking the forces that have corrupted its institutions and re-engineered it as a consumerist wasteland of the soul. He wants the great American People to say no to our country’s aggressive posturing and military adventures that make us less rather than more safe, and no to more pain and suffering like we inflicted on Vietnam and Iraq, for no good reason, as it turned out.
So what does he think it would take to MAGA? Finding less business around the world to mind would be a good start. Putting more corporate criminals in the dock would help. How about we stop tearing families apart, either on foreign battlefields or at our borders? We should settle for no less than full accountability for politicians and CEOs whenever their actions or inaction cause catastrophic harm to innocent lives, taxpayers, or the environment.
There’s a lot of harm they need to answer for: Red scares. Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, plus gratuitous interventions in our own hemisphere. Nuclear brinkmanship. Secret government. Watch lists. The most costly and least fair health care system money can buy. Regulatory regimes held captive by companies they oversee, and news organizations held captive by spooky unaccountable elites and government minders. Geoff wants to make America great again by unmasking the forces that have corrupted its institutions and re-engineered it as a consumerist wasteland of the soul.
There’s not a helluva lot that a fledgling independent press can do to right such overarching wrongs, but it’s worth a shot. So where to begin?
How about the summer of 2015, when refugees converged on Southern Europe from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa as Western democracies battened down to refuse and repulse them. Disgusted by fear and loathing that denied refugees succor and asylum because of their ethnicity or religion, Geoff vowed “I’ll give you your Islamic extremist whom you say hates freedom and is out to destroy your way of life, and make you weep for him.” Three years and three US Muslim bans later, the paranoia is even worse. He thinks it’s high time to change some hearts and minds.
We distribute an occasional email newsletter, Perfidy Press Pronouncements. Sign up to receive Geoff’s musings and news of upcoming events once a month or so. You won’t be spammed with offers you supposedly can’t refuse and can unsubscribe in the blink of a black eye.
About Our Logo
The initial letters “Pe” in our logo look weird because they are Arabic script. They are a stylized rendition of one of the words Arabic has for “perfidy” with an added stroke in the form of a dagger. This is the character we have taken liberties with:
غدر — Treachery, Deceit, Foul Play
Our motto, “What you don’t know can hurt you” flips the well-known homily that implies that ignorance is bliss. We believe that many worldly sorrows could be ameliorated if more people didn’t take pronouncements of politicians, experts, reporters, and pundits at face value. For us, they are fair game, and we aim to serve the public by sorting out the subtext when even the most reliable sources tell us what’s going on.