Reporter Kiera Butler is a Disinfo Dupe

Learn what a “Disinfo Dupe” is here

Update: Honest Media has sent a letter on December 21 to Mother Jones asking them to correct aspects of Butler’s record highlighted below

Kiera Butler is a journalist on a crusade to “save the world” from Donald Trump, “Russian disinformation,” and those dangerous “anti-vaxxers.” However the real danger is within the mix of truth, lies, and spin that Butler combines in her reporting at Mother Jones. Rather than having certain fields in which she seems to excel, Butler’s reporting tends to take a confrontational tone in claiming the latest mainstream “current thing” topic is unquestionably correct and anyone questioning it is stupid or has bad intentions. This type of slippery journalism that seems more concerned with taking sides than the truth is dishonest but also brings us face-to-face with the loss of values such as free speech and civil liberties.

Natural Immunity

Butler wrote “Anti-vaxxers Have a Dangerous Theory Called “Natural Immunity” for Mother Jones in May of 2020, where she stated that any recommendations to bolster the immune system with good nutrition to fight off COVID are “patently false; humanity has never seen the (SARS CoV-2) virus before, therefore our immune systems have no natural defenses against it.”

This claim is a complete lie. The human immune system has been fighting coronaviruses for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Natural immunity in humans has been known to science for over a millennium, recognized by The Lancet and tens of thousands of prominent scientists and doctors the world over. This ridiculous charade of calling natural immunity a “dangerous theory” is one of the most harmful and egregious lies from the mainstream media during COVID.

Butler was forced to address this issue on Twitter in 2022. She tweeted that her report did not refer to “acquired” immunity, but rather the “baseless idea that immune systems that had NEVER BEFORE encountered COVID were superior to vaccines.” Of course the tweet takes her preferred confrontational approach.

Butler doubles down on her original logic rather than acknowledging that natural immunity can be real

This claim may technically be true using the kind of mental gymnastics that Butler excels at, although it is contradicted by her own reporting in the very same report. Butler wrote:

“...the experts I talked to weren’t at all surprised to see these discredited ideas making the rounds; they’ve seen them before in the anti-vaccination and extreme holistic medicine communities. This is the coronavirus edition of their pervasive belief in “natural immunity.” Rupali Limaye, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist who has studied the movement against mandatory vaccines, told me, “We have heard from those that are concerned about vaccines the argument that they prefer to allow their immune system to be naturally exposed to a specific pathogen to gain immunity,” she wrote to me in an email. “It’s a spinoff of previous theories we’ve seen,” concurred Omer, who has written extensively about anti-vaccination groups. “This is all the usual stuff.” [emphasis added]

As we can see here, Butler had earlier mocked the idea that catching COVID could give immunity to future infections better than the protection a vaccine could give. And as early as August of 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walinsky stated COVID vaccines do not stop transmission of SARS CoV-2, which remains the established science today. Nevertheless, Butler doubled down on her original narrative, in a slippery and immoral fashion, vilifying skeptics of these rushed COVID vaccines. No corrections were issued from Butler, nor was there any retraction from Mother Jones, regarding their initial mockery of this (ultimately correct) point of view.

Prebunk?

In October of 2021, Butler wrote that she wanted to “prebunk” claims that experts do not agree on whether COVID vaccines should be given to kids. She cited an FDA 18-person expert committee that voted to approve COVID shots for kids over the age of 5. However, she never updated her claims or backtracked at all when giving these vaccines to kids was called into question and countries like Norway, Sweden, England, and Denmark stopped recommending the COVID vaccine for children.

Mother Jones actually did write a follow-up piece about this topic, citing logic from American ‘experts’ that Scandinavian children are different from American children, which is another example of doing mental gymnastics to double down on their original claim rather than questioning whether they might have jumped the gun. Even the World Health Organization now says healthy children do not need these vaccines. Butler did retweet her colleague’s article, but no correction or update was ever issued regarding the original “prebunk.”

Russia

When Butler attacked “Russian disinfo” in her reporting at Mother Jones, she relied heavily on an individual named Ben Dubow, a fellow at the Democratic Resilience Program which is a non-profit similar to the Alliance Securing Democracy, home of the Hamilton 68 Project. This project claimed to track “Russian disinformation” on the internet, but never revealed its sources. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we now know Hamilton 68 was not at all tracking Russian disinfo accurately, but was itself a disinfo campaign mostly tracking ordinary (non-Russian) citizens. 

Dubow relies on Hamilton 68 as a source in his “Russian Disinfo” research that Butler referenced. The hyperlink Butler used to reference Dubow’s report is now broken. Here is an archived link to Dubow’s reporting that was used in Butler’s Mother Jones piece, as the link in her article no longer works.

Dubow doesn’t retract the Hamilton 68 information he sourced, and no correction is made in Butler’s reporting; only a broken link.

Second Opinion

Butler has slammed documentaries such as Died Suddenly, which – like her – mix truth, lies and spin (only in a different fashion). But she also attacks Americans and doctors who have valid concerns about their rights to get and give second opinions that may not be approved by the state. Butler has severely criticized Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and many doctors for fighting against the physician censorship law passed in California earlier this year. This law allowed the California Medical Board to essentially become a “Ministry of Truth,” determining what doctors can and can’t tell their patients.

The law was shot down in the courts fairly quickly. Additionally, Governor Gavin Newsom – the man who signed the bill into law – recently repealed the law entirely, although quietly. It has become clear that this law was blatantly unconstitutional and would not withstand legal challenge.

No mention of the repeal came from Butler.

Truckers

Butler has attacked people involved in the Trucker Convoy Movement in Canada and the US, saying that moms involved were collaborating with “white nationalists.” One extremist she attempts to connect to the US Convoy effort is Nick Fuentes through an associate of his named Ryan Sanchez. However, neither Sanchez nor Fuentes had anything to do with organizing The People’s Convoy. All Butler references to Sanchez come from his Telegram posts and self-proclaimed “leadership,” rather than any actual organizing of the effort that went across the entire country.

The People’s Convoy was largely overseen by Brian Brase and Mike Landis, neither of whom are white supremacists. They are American Truckers and transportation activists who have spent years in Washington DC lobbying on behalf of the needs of truckers including efforts like 10-4 DC and the United States Transportation Alliance. During The People’s Convoy, Landis in fact had a public confrontation with a far-right wing activist named Jacob Wohl at the Hagerstown Speedway that ended with Landis kicking Wohl off the property. Even the hyper-partisan opinion-soaked Daily Beast reported this fact on March 9, 2022, though it escapes any reporting from Butler or Mother Jones.

Butler briefly mentions Brian Brase in a second report of hers about US Trucker Convoys, which is oddly titled “All the US Convoy Extremists Need Now Are Some Actual Truckers,”even though Brase and Landis are bonafide truckers for decades and provided visible leadership from the very beginning of the convoy effort. The tone of the report is that the convoy was overrun by extremists with no real trucker involvement.

And while it may be valid to earnestly question whether a “trucker” protest is actually comprised of truckers, shouldn’t the main focus be on what the movement is seeking to accomplish? Clearly Butler is trying to cast these doubts to discredit the entire movement in the court of public opinion rather than to determine how many people there were truckers. But instead of discussing anything in-depth about the real trucker leaders, or giving numbers (even approximations) about what kind of people were there, she focuses on Leigh Dundas, an attorney who was present at the January 6 demonstration in Washington, DC and was ultimately removed from The People’s Convoy by the authentic Trucker leadership.

Butler even admits in her article that “some” of the leaders of these protests have a history of other activism, while ignoring that the others were indeed real truckers, all of which contradicts the clickbait title that implies none of them are actual truckers. She then spends the second half of the article analyzing the apparent disorganization of the protests, which again has nothing to do with her article’s title but is clearly a brazen attempt to discredit the protests and participants.

No update reporting these facts was ever provided by Butler.

The Fourth Estate plays a major role in protecting free speech and civil liberties in America. Free press and free speech are meant to go hand-in-hand to hold the government accountable to the people they lead, as established in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Labeling truth as “disinfo” has major consequences that ripple beyond the written word into laws, policy, and enforcement that can shred the Bill of Rights and our Constitution.

But we really can’t expect the fabric of our society to be protected by #DisinfoDupes like Kiera Butler.

Another example of Butler’s tribal, condescending language when analyzing politics