Apparently #DisinfoDupe Kiera Butler Hasn’t Learned Anything

Unfounded Attacks from Mother Jones on RFK Jr. Continue

Kiera Butler was featured as Honest Media’s first Disinfo Dupe due to her deceptive style of writing that encourages political tribalism rather than genuine reporting. As we said previously, she mixes truth, lies, and spin to give the impression of sharing the news when in actuality she is being intentionally divisive.

After our initial piece on Butler, we found within hours of publishing it that she had blocked Honest Media on the social media platform X. We sent an email to Mother Jones addressing specific concerns with inaccuracies in specific pieces she had written, as detailed in our previous article, but received no response. We then sent a letter by FedEx to the Mother Jones’ headquarters addressed to CEO Clara Jeffrey and Chief Editor Monika Bauerlein, covering all of our concerns, but again received no response. 

The most recent development came on February 15. Honest Media managing editor Michael Kane called David Corn, who is the Washington D.C. bureau chief editor for Mother Jones, and asked him a series of questions. One of them was if Corn could bring our letter and concerns to the attention of their CEO and Chief Editor. He said that he would “ping them” but that was all he could do. We have never heard from Mother Jones in this regard.

Issues we pointed out in her writing remain in the published versions online and, most notably, her misleading titles have not been amended (including “Anti-Vaxxers Have a Dangerous Theory Called Natural Immunity”)

Nevertheless, she is at it again. On February 8, Butler published an article titled “RFK Jr. Is Planning to Speak at a Conference Featuring a Guy Who Talks About Jews Controlling the World.” The scoop was that presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. planned to speak at a conference in Las Vegas called RePlatform and Create the Freedom Economy from March 8-10.

Given the busy schedules of presidential campaigns and the need to engage all kinds of voters, it is not at all surprising for a candidate to speak at a conference with those he disagrees with. In fact, in the polarized age that we now live in, as demonstrated by Pew Research in 2014 (and it has only gotten worse since then), politicians would do well to speak with, and learn from, people with different kinds of beliefs and attempt to create middle ground and mutual goals whenever possible. This has been precisely one of the most appealing aspects of Kennedy’s campaign for President, as he is actively seeking to “heal the divide” that is deeply damaging our nation.

Nevertheless, Butler managed to base an entire article for Mother Jones on her feigned outrage for Kennedy attending this event. Butler seems more interested in antagonizing anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow orthodoxy that she espouses than in trying to comprehend the real nuances of life, people’s views, and how a candidate fosters political appeal.

Curiously, despite the article’s title, very little of the piece actually talks about Kennedy or the “guy who talks about Jews controlling the world.” Instead, she goes through other speakers and past comments or even other appearances they have made. She talks about attendees including Steve Kirsch, a businessman and vaccine safety advocate, and a group called Pronatalist that encourages people to have more children.

An especially misleading section talks about Lonnie Passoff, the president of alternative payment company Green.Money, who will be speaking at the conference. Rather than addressing what Passoff generally stands for or might say at the conference, Butler devotes a large section of her article to talking about Passoff’s recent appearance on a podcast, which was hosted by Stew Peters. Butler chose to extensively quote an exchange between Passoff and Peters in her article that demonstrates no clear relevance to Kennedy or the RePlatform conference, but it does almost give the impression that Peters is yet another conference attendee (he’s not). Based on Butler’s history, this confusion may have been intentional.

To be clear, the Stew Peters show often does feature guests with extreme views and questionable fact checking. So it makes sense that Butler is trying to pull Stew Peters as close to the RePlatform Conference (really as close to Kennedy) as possible considering her evident goal to smear and cause division.

Nevertheless, the podcast exchange that she did cite seems to be the basis of her article’s title. It contains a quick and rather vague reference to Peters saying “the scientific lobby that controls the entire economy and the media and our entire government” in response to Passoff talking about Jewish people and the Jewish state. Yet apparently this comment by Peters – who is not featured at the RePlatform conference – was enough for her to conclude that Passoff feels the same way, and thus associate the entire conference with the trope that “Jews control the world.” 

It is the exact mix of truth, lies, and spin that our previous article on Butler warned about. Yet here she goes again.

Most interestingly of all, Butler and Mother Jones did manage to revise the title for this article. The new version is entitled, “RFK Jr. Is (No Longer) [emphasis added] Planning to Speak at a Conference Featuring a Guy Who Talks About Jews Controlling the World” with the subtitle “He canceled a few days after Mother Jones reported on the conference’s extremist speakers.” It also contains the following editor’s note:

Update, February 12: In a February 12 email to Mother Jones, RePlatform spokesperson Heather DeSantis said Kennedy had canceled his appearance at the conference. “We respect his decision and wish the best for him and his campaign,” she added.

This update essentially renders Butler’s entire article pointless from a news-reporting perspective because Kennedy is in fact not planning to speak at the RePlatform conference. So while this appearance is no longer “news” in any way, shape, or form, it does accomplish its clear true goal of smearing Kennedy’s name and candidacy. Butler and Mother Jones have even managed to spin the canceled appearance into something that they can take credit for, implying that their article was the reason he decided not to speak at the conference. No mention of how common it is for politicians to change their schedules and public appearances.

If Butler can make this kind of update to her work, then why has she steadfastly refused to fix the inaccuracies highlighted in Honest Media’s previous piece on her?

Read our Disinfo Dupe report on Butler here

Read our letter to Mother Jones top executives here

See our FedEx receipt for letter to top executives here