For the last few weeks of this election, snark has been perhaps the only weapon in Hillary Clinton’s media campaign. Hillary doesn’t even have to speak much if at all publicly so long as her Twitter account keeps ripping off zingers. And it’s working like gangbusters because many liberal journalists on social media also want to be seen as the snarkiest. And when this snarky elephant walk gets going, the cable news joins in and suddenly we’re no longer even talking about Flint anymore because HILLARY CLINTON JUST PWND…on Twitter dot com.

Electoral innovation is dominating the news cycle for a day because of a 140 character smackdown.

Haha fuck the poor.

But let me tell you something: snark is the humor of the privileged who have the luxury of labeling themselves progressive while never worrying about their skin being in the game.

Snark is very much what Bourdieu might consider a mark of distinction, sought by elite to signal to each other that they too love status circlejerks. They can laugh when Republicans chant about deporting Muslims because they don’t have to worry about midnight door-knocking. They can laugh because it won’t be their kids at the end of that blue bullet.

Snark is a cultivated skill that comes from having the luxury of consuming the news as sport and not as its victim. It’s easier to watch the news every day when it’s not people of your own skin color getting blown up by American bombs. It’s more fun to mock the talk radio stars for being human cancer when it’s not your religion they’re asking viewers to persecute. It’s easier to write sweet #content when the person being threatened in it isn’t you.

Snark is now the fuel running the new media game because it’s the easiest way to fill up a page of writing without having to leave one’s desk, go out and do actual journalism. Why pay someone to report on actual events when you can have them spend all day writing about Elizabeth Warren’s ultimate twitter smackdown.

In terms of strategy, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is absolutely on point running a snark game because she’s feeding a sick hungry ghost. The content writes itself — MSNBC doesn’t even have to wait for a press release. Every tweet becomes a story, every story real estate for advertisers. Hillary Clinton’s snark campaign prints media money and Hillary gets free advertising.

Win-win.

But is snark the right response when it’s towards a man winning half the vote by threatening the wellbeing of virtually every American citizen? Right off the bat, we know his absurd economic policies will destroy the economy. If you listen to Chris Christie talk, we’re going to have about 800 times more cops all getting paid as much as software engineers to gun down Black kids for no reason. Unions will be criminalized. Everyone who cooks anything decent is getting deported. Fracking forever.

You’ll find that there’s really only a small sliver of the population that’s getting out of Trump’s reach with a snowball’s chance: rich, white people with the luxury of watching the news for sport so as to make jokes about it.

Everyone else?

They need a hero.

I’m willing to say this is a crisis. It’s not a drill. That there are this many people willing to fucking Sieg Heil a man on live TV is that moment we agree this isn’t funny anymore.

When you sit down and ask yourself what response you wish we were getting from a leader right now, I hope you don’t say you’re wishing for more snark.

I hope you recognize that the severity of the situation warrants more than jokes.

I hope you know that these are the trials that test a hero’s mettle.