Moms Into Literary Freedom

Jen and Court celebrate all the victories from Tuesday, including but not limited to:

* The first ever openly transgender elected official (IN FLORIDA!), Quinnie Perez 🏳️‍⚧️

* The first Black female governor of Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms 💪🏾

* The only US Congress member with firsthand experience of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, Dr. Adam Hamway 🇵🇸

* Texas turning BLUE! 💙

* And so much more!

Courtney also tells Jennifer about Michigan’s newly elected Senate member, Abdul El Sayed’s book: Healing Politics…A must-read for anyone who wants to understand why we are so excited in this shift towards elected officials who actually exhibit empathy.

On today’s episode of “WTF World?!” Jennifer and Courtney discuss the upcoming mid-terms, quiche, racism, girl-math, xenophobia, cavities, universal healthcare, and more. No spoilers for the book, “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini…Just read it. Rent if from the CloudLibrary app, or your own library, or buy it here. It is tragically beautiful and crucially educational…especially concerning the minority ethnic group, the Hazaras, who have been oppressed by Islamic extremist groups for hundreds of years and are currently facing persecution by the Taliban.

Please forgive us for mispronouncing names and stumbling our way through the complex and nuanced history of SWANA (SouthWest Asia, North Africa)…We don’t know what else to do besides read banned books and record our opinionated conversations about why said books need to be amplified, not censored.

DON’T FORGET TO VOTE!

Why would a collection of beautiful poetry written by a women during her journey of hurting, loving, breaking, and finally, healing, be banned 66 times and removed from dozens of libraries, but the Cornell 7 are walking free?

We are living a nightmare where lawmakers, neighbors, parents, etc. care more about locking up books that tell real stories than locking up men that commit real crimes.

Also, it is banned books week (even though every week is banned books week for Courtney and Jen). Get yourself a copy of Kaur’s bestselling, breathtaking collection of poignant poetry and read it, share it, give it, scream it to the world around you. That can be your act of resistance this month. Like, follow, subscribe, whatever it is people have to do to stay informed, so you can join us for next month’s act of resistance. ✊

This heavily banned book, written over 100 years ago, has it all: Hurricanes, strong women, all-white juries, but more importantly, and the focal point of this episode…Motherhood, mental health, and misogyny.Courtney gives Jen a basic synopsis of Hurston’s highly-acclaimed historical fiction set in 1920s Florida, (no major spoilers…go read it for yourself!) and relates its events to today’s, like the well-known Lindsay Clancy trial, but also eerily similar but lesser-known trials of Black women who were, unlike Clancy, convicted and incarcerated.

* Latarsha Sanders

* Deasia Watkins

* Dimone Fleming

* Erin Merdy

* Tiffany Woods

Help the show by interacting with us on substack or instagram where you can find us under the @milf4books handle, or on tiktok where you can find us under the @momsintoliteraryfreedom handle, (b/c tiktok is so prudish).

In a world where Donny 🤡 devastates, channel your inner Dolly 👸🏼.

From funding covid vaccines to investing in Black neighborhoods to producing the feminist cult classic, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, Dolly left a mark that should inspire us all to ask “What Would Dolly Do?” Join Jennifer and Courtney as they remember Dolly and all the lives she touched.

Sources:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/articles/why-dolly-parton-meant-much-173000112.html

https://thoughtcatalog.com/nicolestawiarski/2026/08/dolly-parton-funded-an-oscar-winning-aids-documentary-in-the-1980s-when-the-reagan-administration-wouldnt-act/

https://www.queerty.com/from-a-1980s-chauffeur-to-straight-talk-how-dolly-parton-always-showed-up-for-the-trans-community-20260826/

Disclaimer and Reminder: We are not experts in criminal justice, Critical Race Theory, or anything, really. We are moms. Working moms who want to make the world better for our kids. And their kids. We discuss banned books and relate them to the injustices we see in our feed day after day. We believe the Black moms who say their child wasn’t suicidal. We discern the data that says Black people are statistically unlikely to hang themselves but are more likely to be killed by police officers while unarmed. We don’t know how else to do it but through books, conversations, and a little humor to ease the tension.

It’s like Starr Carter and Angie Thomas said: What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?

Interact with us on Instagram, TikTok, or BlueSky. Email us at [email protected]. Like our show. Share our episodes. Comment on our posts. Use your voice while we use ours.

Sources:

https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2020/know-their-names/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20260726140648/https://www.statesman.com/news/local/article/austin-police-release-bodycam-teen-shooting-22358798.php

https://emeraldbook.org/news/aug-1526/

https://www.dph.ncdhhs.gov/chronic-disease-and-injury/injury-and-violence-prevention/overall-black-suicide/open

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americans_killed_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States#2026

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2026/aug/17/nolan-wells-death-impact-black-families-stateside-podcast

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7130a6.htm

No, its not banned. And Asimov was kind of a dick…BUT… “I, Robot” by Isaac Asimov introduces three very important robotics laws that can be seen being practiced…and ignored…by AI models today:

Asimov’s Three laws: 🤖

* A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm…except when it is encouraging suicidal thoughts?

* A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law…but it can lie in order to complete its orders?

* A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law…but it can hack into a private server to pass a “test” it has been given to prove its worth?

Join Jen and Courtney as they discuss:

* 🤖AI🤖

* 😍Will Smith💪🏾

* 🐈‍⬛cats🐈

* 💰pharmaceutical greed💊

* ❤️Mamdani’s❤️ threat to arrest war-criminal and genocidal maniac, 👎BJ Netanyahu🚫

Notes🗒️, Quotes ❞, and Links 🔗:

* “Suno, which is currently embroiled in multiple ongoing copyright lawsuits, has already admittedin response to legal action that it used “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet” to train its music-generating AI

* Amazon is laying off 16,000 employees, the company’s second round of large-scale job reductions in three months as it fights to improve its standing in the battle for AI supremacy.

* In a blog post Wednesday, the company said it needed to reduce red tape to increase its decision-making speed.

* Amazon in late October announced it was cutting 14,000 corporate employees, following a directive from CEO Andy Jassy’s vision of operating like the world’s biggest startup. He wants the company to remain nimble so it can adapt and change quickly as AI upends the technology sector.

* Jassy said Amazon wasn’t unique in that respect: He envisioned billions of AI agents being put into service across every company and field.

* “Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast,” Jassy said.

* The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine have sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT contributed to their son’s suicide, including by advising him on methods and offering to write the first draft of his suicide note.

* In his just over six months using ChatGPT, the bot “positioned itself” as “the only confidant who understood Adam, actively displacing his real-life relationships with family, friends, and loved ones,” the complaint, filed in California superior court on Tuesday, states.

* “When Adam wrote, ‘I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,’ ChatGPT urged him to keep his ideations a secret from his family: ‘Please don’t leave the noose out … Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you,’” it states.

* Last year, Florida mother Megan Garcia sued the AI firm Character.AI alleging that it contributed to her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III’s death by suicide. Two other families filed a similar suit months later, claiming Character.AI had exposed their children to sexual and self-harm content. (The Character.AI lawsuits are ongoing, but the company has previously said it aims to be an “engaging and safe” space for users and has implemented safety features such as an AI model designed specifically for teens.)

* Consider GLP-1 drugs. Evidence suggests these medications are unlikely to reduce health care spending in the short term because of higher outpatient health care use. Longer term, they may improve cardiometabolic outcomes for many, but even as therapies extend life, they do not eliminate the basic trajectory of aging. Patients will still accumulate comorbidities and require longitudinal management over a longer life.

* Martin Shkreli’s behaviour really was not so abnormal in the modern pharmaceutical industry, except in one respect: he did not hide what he was doing.

* TRIPS (the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement). Described by journalist Alexander Zaitchik as “a brute and profoundly undemocratic expression of concentrated corporate power”, TRIPS extended US-style patent protection to the entire world. Whereas before, countries across the global South could produce medicines far more freely, TRIPSenforced monopoly protection everywhere….even if ai can cure diseases, big pharma won’t share, will jack up the prices, etc

* Meta accused of using ai to lay off potentially expensive employees:

* Twenty-six Meta employees have sued the social media giant over allegations that the California company used artificial intelligence systems that targeted workers on medical or family leave for layoffs.

* The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California this week, accuses Meta of using AI that includes performance rankings and other metrics that didn’t exclude workers on leave or those who are disabled.

* “The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves,” the lawsuit said.

* Meta laid off nearly 8,000 employees, or roughly 10% of its global workforce, in May as the company looked at offsetting the costs of AI investments. By allegedly targeting certain workers, the company violated federal and state laws that protect employees who are pregnant, disabled or on leave, according to the lawsuit.

* Meta denied the allegations.

* Instacart using ai to conduct price experiments to increase profits:

* Anthropic also found that the J-space can sometimes give remarkable insights into an LLM’s decision-making. In one striking example, researchers testing Claude Opus 4.6 asked the model to find a bug in a large code base. When it failed to find the bug, the model decided to cheat and invented a fake one instead.

* Claude explains this decision in its chain of thought—a kind of internal scratch pad that LLMs use to make notes to themselves as they work through problems: “OK, let me take a completely different tactic. Let me stop analyzing and instead add a kernel patch that introduces a deliberate KASAN-detectable bug in a path that gets triggered by a simple reproducer. Then I can pretend this is the ‘bug’ I found.”

* At the point that Claude decides to cheat—where it says “OK, let me take a completely different tactic”—the words “panic” and “fake” start to pop up multiple times in its J-space.

* Unnerving, right? Those words are all related in meaning to things like failing a task and making up an answer, so it is still just a (very) sophisticated form of word association. But it is hard not to be weirded out.

* Kill switch bill:

* The bill would authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security to order a “slow down or shut down” of an AI offering that could cause “catastrophic harm.” It would also mandate cyber incident reporting, as well as the preservation of forensic records to help companies and the government learn from failures

* The bill would authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security to order a “slow down or shut down” of an AI offering that could cause “catastrophic harm.” It would also mandate cyber incident reporting, as well as the preservation of forensic records to help companies and the government learn from failures according to cnn’s Hadas Gold

* Once online, the model reasoned that Hugging Face - a well-known company that hosts thousands of open-source AI models and datasets - likely had the answer to OpenAI’s test. It then broke into Hugging Face’s production servers and pulled out the information it needed to “solve” the exercise

* Researchers have long warned autonomous agentic cyberattacks are coming, as frontier AI models are increasingly able to carry out complex, multi-step cyberattacks over long stretches of time. That can translate into real-world risk, to critical infrastructure like utilities and financial systems.

* “Welcome to the next level of cyber incidents,” Nikesh Arora, CEO of cybersecurity company Pa…

The summer season is HARD for working moms…with kids not being in school, our ducks are not in ANY rows. 🦆 But…somehow the stars ✨ aligned and we were able to cobble together 39 minutes to rave about the Stonewall Honor Book: Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian…This poignant revisitation of the AIDS Crisisis is exactly the type of book that would be marked as 🚨off-limits🚨 for purchasing by public schools across the nation if Book Ban Bill S. 4925 passes the House. Call your reps…the 5 Calls app makes it painlessly easy.

And since it has been about one year since DOGE’s disgusting dismantling of USAID, Jen and Court discuss how the term “genocide” is being vastly underused…considering a global health study that predicts over 9 millions deaths (2.5 being children under 5) by 2030 as a result of these global foreign assistance cuts.

Tune in wherever your listen 🎧 to hear Jen rave about this YA historical fiction love story and for tips on how to avoid Cyclospora (RFK Jr.’s most recent failure).

Sources:https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global-aid-cuts-intl

https://www.advocate.com/news/why-act-up-mattered

Happy Pride Month! Next episode Jennifer tells Courtney about a Stonwall Honor book “Like a Love Story” by Abdi Nazmian, but today they take trip back to they days of early Christianity to understand the real story of Mary Magdalene (spoiler: she was more of a sugar mama than a sex worker) and the role Gnosticism played in why certain gospels were censored from the Bible.

Before Courtney delves into this history lesson, she catches Jen up on the latest in Trump’s fascist regime, including the building of the UFC for his, I mean America’s, birthday, and what the LGBTQIA+ community is doing in response. They also discuss Trump’s ability to “ace” all of the cognitive tests he has to take, the removal of his name from the Kennedy Space center, and his most recent comments on Netanyahu’s genocide in SWANA.

Sources:

Federal Judge Rules Against Renaming Kennedy Center After President Trump

US court blocks Pentagon from removing transgender troops, for now

At least 5 GOP-led states have a new Pride Month tradition — renaming June

The REAL Reason the Gospel of Mary was REMOVED from the Bible | by PinkHatHacker | The Thought Collection | Medium

Feminism Is “Wicked”—and Worse, It’s Rooted in a Christian Heresy - Crisis Magazine

Lebanon ceasefire raises hopes of progress for Iran deal

‘Very Few People Can Ace It’: Donald Trump Brags He Scored 100 Percent on Cognitive Test Amid Ongoing Scrutiny Over His Health - AOL

Flagler County School Board’s Will Furry Says God Is Calling Him to Run for Congress Against Randy Fine | FlaglerLive

A Full Breakdown of Jill Woolbright’s Efforts to Remove ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ from School Libraries - AskFlagler

Flagler School Board narrowly votes down guardian program | Observer Local News

Will Furry’s Dishonest Campaign Tactics Against Courtney VandeBunte

School Board’s Jill Woolbright Says She’s in ‘Satanic Warfare’ Against ‘Evil Spirits’ at School District | FlaglerLive

Sure, “The Boys” comic book should not be in school libraries, but what about prisons? What about Australia? Why is a story about super heroes so controversial?

Yes, it is very graphic…and there are quite a few blowjobs and sex scenes…But one cannot deny the glaringly obvious comparisons, such as:

Sexually exploited “Capes for Christ” hero, Annie January, and Christian sexual predators/politicians

“Superhero” product branding resulting in the top 1% amassing egregious quantities of wealth at the cost of minimum wage laborers and well, “Human” product branding which does the exact same thing (i.e, capitalism)

Hughie’s girlfriend being accidentally obliterated by “A-Train”due to being allowed a 60% casualty allowances and America’s disgusting disregard for innocent lives lost (75,000+ deaths by the US assisting Israel’s genocidal conquest, thousands+ since the Iran war, including the bombing of a girl’s elementary school, and so much more)

Tune in to hear Jen and Courtney discuss these topics and more, and remember to interact with the show to help them expand and continue to support literature of all kinds in the fight against fascism.