It has been an incredibly long, blisteringly hot summer and I for one am rather exhausted. If you feel the same way, please allow yourself to be refreshed by the alertness and expressions of basic to well-developed human decency from this month’s wokest baes.
Mark Cuban
Bae Factor:
By a very narrow margin of victory, Mark Cuban garnered a “Would” in Jezebel’s illustrious “Would U” series. And as they say in The Fast and the Furious: “It doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile, winning’s winning.”
Woke Factor: As a result of all my Shark Tank viewing, I did assume Mark Cuban had enough common sense not to support Donald Trump, but I truly didn’t think he’d be going so hard in the paint for Hillary Clinton. Nice surprise! He is a very, very, very rich white man and let’s just say that demographic is not always great at caring about people who don’t fit that description. But Cubes is out here stumping for Hillary which means he’s not ok with an actual psychopath deporting brown people and maligning the parents of our fallen troops. Salute to your conscience, Mark.
Adam Silver
Bae Factor
One thing I very much appreciate about Adam Silver is his ability to look exactly the same in every single photograph I’ve ever seen of him. That feels like a skill. I won’t pretend like I don’t occasionally make allowances here at Wokest Baes and yes, this is probably one. But if you’re into bald heads and teeth, this is a no-brainer.
Woke Factor: In response to players from the Minnesota’s WNBA team the Lynx, Silver was about as woke as he could be. To be fair, it was speaking about a league he doesn’t actually have control over. Largely, Silver gets points for having the exact opposite reaction of the WNBA which we’ll get to later. Let’s also consider this a delayed bestowal of wokeness for getting rid of Donald Sterling’s racist ass which should have not have been a surprising decision but definitely was because how often do terrible rich white men really get their comeuppance?
John Leguizamo
Bae Factor
I shall allow it.
Woke Factor: I mean, look at those woke-ass books. John follows the Matt McGorry school of wokeness by sharing a picture of the woke books he’s woke-reading, because if we don’t know for sure that you’ve read We Should All Be Feminists, how do I even know that you’re truly a feminist?
My favorite part of this picture is the pen marking his place which let’s you know that he’s not only definitely reading the book, but that he’s also taking notes. Notes! You really have to be paying attention if you’re gonna be marking up a book like that. That’s what I call alert.
Ryan Reynolds
Bae Factor
Ryan Reynolds does not possess a look that does a damn thing for me, but I am able to understand appeal of conventional Hollywood attractiveness and this is definitely that.
Woke Factor: Ryan was calling out the site Refinery29 for jacking a tweet of his without an attribution. This is a sightly different kind of wokeness than you’re used to here Wokest Baes but there’s levels to this shit (that I’m making up as I go along). You see how he put the photos side-by-side so we could truly grasp the injustice of it all. Perhaps Ryan just wants credit for his sorta funny tweet. But maybe he’s trying to open all of our minds to the dangers of stolen tweets and attributing quotes to “anonymous” sources. Yes, that’s definitely what he was trying to do.
Fumbles In Wokeness or Baemanship
The WNBA
For having a truly terrible response to their players protesting black people being gunned down by the police, the WNBA finds itself in a massive woke fumble. Players from the Minnesota Lynx wore Black Lives Matter t-shirts during their warmups and post-game press conference and spoke about the need for change.
Off-duty Minnesota police officers who were working the game decided that they were unable to do their work because a few people expressed concern with their tendency to murder black people with impunity, and walked off the job. Protect and serve, eh?
While that response was shitty, it wasn’t exactly surprising. The bigger issue was that the WNBA decided to fine the players for their actions. (Hey, remember when NBA players did basically the same thing and the NBA was like, “alright.”)
Realizing the idiocy of their move, Lisa Borders, the President of the WNBA and a black woman, rescinded the fines but girl, we already see your drowsiness.