Performative Lying: When Power Stops Pretending
“When power lies without flinching, it’s not deception—it’s domination. The truth is no longer disputed. It’s defied.” - Mary Coughlin
Performative Lying: When Power Stops Pretending
Performative Lies Do 4 Key Things:
How Falsehood Becomes a Weapon—And What We Can Do About It
There’s a special kind of lie that doesn’t try to hide.
It doesn’t whisper.
It doesn’t squirm under scrutiny.
It stands tall, smug, and unashamed—daring you to question it.
This is performative lying.
And it’s not just deceit.
It’s domination.
What Is Performative Lying?
Unlike a lie meant to avoid embarrassment or cover up a mistake, performative lies are told on purpose, in public, and often in plain defiance of fact.
They aren’t just meant to convince you.
They’re meant to control you.
When an elected official says something demonstrably false—like “the 2020 election was stolen,” or “climate change is a hoax”—they aren’t necessarily speaking to reality.
They’re testing loyalty.
They’re forcing a choice: agree with the lie or be cast as the enemy.
Performative Lies Do 4 Key Things:
Show Power
“I can say whatever I want, and you can’t stop me.”Demand Loyalty
“If you’re really with me, you’ll repeat this—even if it costs you your integrity.”Distort Reality
“You’re not allowed to trust your own eyes or your own moral compass.”Punish Truth-Telling
“If you question me, you’re weak, woke, unpatriotic—or worse.”
It’s Not Just Political. It’s Psychological.
Performative lying is a form of gaslighting at scale.
It creates disorientation.
It seeds fear.
It makes people second-guess what they know to be true—sometimes to the point of numbness or resignation.
And for trauma survivors, especially those with histories of coercion or manipulation, it can feel eerily familiar.
Why It Works (For a While)
Authoritarian leaders don’t need everyone to believe them.
They just need enough people to repeat the lie, or remain silent in the face of it.
In a trauma-informed frame, we understand:
Some people repeat the lie to stay safe.
Some go along because the truth is too painful to confront.
Some believe the lie because they’ve been conditioned to trust power over principle.
But all of us are impacted when lies replace truth as the foundation of public life.
What We Can Do
We don’t need to match rage with rage.
We need to match manipulation with clarity, fear with integrity, and performance with presence.
Here’s how we resist performative lying:
Name it: Say out loud what is happening. Don’t minimize it.
Reclaim your compass: Return to your core values, even if others don’t.
Support truth-tellers: Especially those being punished for it.
Tell the truth anyway: Not because everyone will listen, but because someone might.
Hold the line in community: Lies lose their power when truth is shared.
This is not about political sides.
This is about the soul of our civic life—and whether truth still has a place in it.
We don’t have to be perfect.
But we do have to be present.
And we do have to choose: silence or truth, comfort or courage.
Because when lying becomes a performance, telling the truth becomes an act of resistance.
In clarity and courage,
Mary
