Both sides in the dispute over Delaney Hall have accused New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill of lying about the State Police response to the protesters outside of the facility. A preliminary to litigating any such dispute is to address a prior question: would Mikie Sherrill lie to you? Is she even capable of it? Are there conditions under which you could expect Sherrill to lie?

We’re forced to ask such questions because if one goes by PR appearances, the answer would seem to be no. Mikie Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot, a former prosecutor, a successful former Congressional representative, and an attractive suburban soccer mom. Surely such a civic-minded person is incapable of lying to anyone?

Guess again. Actually, the answers to all of the preceding questions turn out demonstrably to be yes. Yes, Mikie Sherrill would lie to you; yes she’s capable of it; and yes there are clear circumstances in which you could expect her to do so. How do we know this? Because she demonstrably did lie in a colossal, egregious way during her campaign for governor last fall.

The essential work on this topic has been done by Terrence T. McDonald, editor of The New Jersey Globe, in a piece he wrote last October, “Mikie Sherrill’s wild, dangerous claim about Jack Ciatterreli.” Like so many people today, McDonald was too genteel to say that Sherrill was lying, but that’s exactly what she was doing:

NEW BRUNSWICK — Mikie Sherrill went in for the kill Wednesday night by accusing Jack Ciattarelli of being a killer.

The shocking moment came about 40 minutes into the final gubernatorial debate between Sherrill, a congresswoman and Democrat, and Ciattarelli, a Republican trying for the third time to make it to Drumthwacket.

A moderator had just asked the would-be governors how they would bring jobs to New Jersey. Sherrill used her answer to question Ciattarelli’s bona fides as a businessman and claim he made millions publishing propaganda for the opioid industry. And then:

“I think you’re trying to divert from the fact that you killed tens of thousands of people by printing your misinformation, your propaganda,” Sherrill said to him. “Families across this state deserve to know more about that.”

Sherrill’s claims here are complete bullshit. Owning a publication company, and putting out “propaganda” about opioids through it, do not kill anyone. Sherrill’s use of the term “propaganda” is itself tendentious. The use of opioids for pain control is simply a contested topic. One can’t responsibly talk about while making random accusations of criminality. Opioids are FDA approved pain medications, not mere poisons. So no one can honestly claim that promoting them is murder. Chronic pain is a bigger problem–affects more people than–addiction in this country. So no one can claim that the promotion of opioids for pain relief is some obvious scam, much less a murderous one. No one of Sherrill’s pedigree, education, experience, and intelligence could fail to know such things. So she was lying.

Mikie Sherrill at Bloomfield Democratic Party meeting, May 12, 2018 (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

This episode neatly answers our third question. Under what conditions would Mikie Sherrill lie to you? She would lie to you if her political ambitious were threatened by some obstacle that threatened seriously to derail them. Last October, the obstacle was Jack Ciatterelli. Right now, the obstacles are the anti-ICE protesters at Delaney Hall. Is it plausible to think she’d lie about the latter? Yes, because we know that she lied about the former. How do we get from the one circumstance to the other? Because the two circumstances are, in all salient respects, the same, and the person placed in them is the same. There’s no reason to think that Sherrill has, on assuming office as governor, undergone some transformative moral change since October. The evidence suggests that she’s the same liar-under-pressure now as she was then. So, as a background assumption, we should expect her to lie.

I haven’t established that Sherrill has lied about Delaney Hall, but I haven’t meant to. My aim here is simply to contest the squeaky-clean Mom-centered image that’s come down the pike, and impeded clear thinking about Mikie Sherrill. We like to romanticize Moms, lying to ourselves about their presumptive virtue. But the hard, cold truth is that like everyone else, Moms lie. My own mother can barely open her mouth without lying about something. They give birth to us, our Moms, but that doesn’t make them paragons of honesty, and we should stop pretending that it does. It’s one thing to be fooled by them when nothing much is at sake, but another to be fooled about the likes of Delaney Hall. Delaney Hall is an island in the growing gulag archipelago we’ve allowed our government to build under our noses. We can’t afford to fool ourselves about a place like that, but that’s the risk we run in believing the likes of Mikie Sherrill. Think twice before you do.