If you must lie (and you must), lie honorably

There are two kinds of public lying, dishonorable and honorable.

The dishonorable kind is all about creating change through lying — it's a tactic to get your enemy to do something they otherwise wouldn't. Trump-thugs, COINTELPRO, "Project Veritas" and other scum have only lies on their side, and so that's all they can use. The same is true of the entire public-relations and advertising industries, actually.... And remember those WMDs in Iraq?

The honorable use of public lying is to get your audience to do something because it's true. It's at least as ancient as the other kind. That's what we do, and why we always reveal our lies almost immediately. If we don't reveal them, they simply don't work. (See also this long rant on the subject.)

For examples of the honorable kind of lying, see any of the projects we've been involved with, as well as many thousands of others — and, especially, this article on the extraordinary Birds Aren't Real movement.

Instances in which we learned this lesson

(Diana Taylor was the main originator of this action. This is an excerpt of the last chapter of her 2020 book, ¡¡Presente! The Politics of Presence.…
Having overcome a minor administrative hurdle, Mike and Andy arrive in Sydney (this time, the flight has been funded by various arts organizations,…
On Monday, Nov. 8, the Yes Men sent out a fake press release on behalf of private-jet outfitter Yasava with some very real news about this utterly,…
Through some Yes Men sleight of hand, we ended up as Newsmax's contact for the American Enterprise Institute. And when they wanted to talk about the…
Back in 2011, a small brainstorm around the NYPD's racial profiling ("Stop and Frisk") led to an idea that everyone laughed and cringed at…
An Amsterdam neighborhood thrills that the City is making their local squat official—and then helps to save it from eviction, for real. Sometimes…
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Shortly after launching a battalion of Survivaballs to draw attention to the climate crisis in advance of the COP15 (that we had some fun at as well…
In 2012, as part of helping Shell to (mis)launch their Arctic drill rig, we decided to "help" Shell with their "Let's Go" ad campaign too.  First,…
So how did we end up speaking to 350 million people on behalf of Dow Chemical? It's a pretty long story—much longer than what we could tell in our…