Flynt/Wu's tweet makes no sense to me. Shouldn't "a lot less to lose" be "a lot more to lose"? It seems to me that those with the most to lose would be in favor of polite discourse leading to no change in the status quo.
What am I missing here?
Nothing. Wu has it exactly backwards. The
more you've got to lose, the more conservative you're likely to be. The single best teacher I ever had summed it up, "Liberal versus conservative always just boils down to 'we could be doing so much better,' versus 'calm down; let's not fuck up what we've already got.'"
People who've carved out a place for themselves in the world, people with families and jobs and attachments,
those are the people who want calm civil discourse and peaceful changes in policy. It's why "person with nothing left to lose" is a dangerous action hero (in their heads, anyway), because they don't give a shit if there are burning cars in the street.
Social Justice types fucking
love calling out "tone policing" and saying things like, "you can't expect [marginalized group] to be
polite on the streets (or on Twitter) when we're DYING OUT HERE." It's because they've accomplished so little by conventional standards.
Trust Wu to not even get her own social justice party line correct.