“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.” ― Ayn Rand

Colin Kaepernick is a fashionable non-conformist. His non-conformity is a safe one, in which he is rewarded. His NFL career was going nowhere, so he created a new one as a non-conformist – a fashionable one, only striking out at safe targets.

So, in many ways, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her non-conformities follow predictable, safe patterns. As do the 20 dwarfs running in the Democratic Presidential Sweepstakes. They even seem to be in a bidding war as to who can offer the most outrageous non-conformity. Yet none of them truly have skin in the game. They face no penalty for their ridiculousness.

Ultimately, all are cowards. And this is the reason the mob – twitter mobs, the Resistance, or Antifa – has become so prominent among the Progressives. Because except for a few part-of-a-men among them, they are all cowards.

Nor, as Colonel Sherburn from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows, is this new. In the book he faces down a lynch mob, one man against one hundred, and drives them off with these words:

“The idea of you lynching anybody!  It’s amusing.  The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man!  Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man?  Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him.

“Do I know you?  I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.  In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot.  Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver.  Why don’t your juries hang murderers?  Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do.

“So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal.  Your mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake, and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought part of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you hadn’t had him to start you, you’d a taken it out in blowing.

“You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger.  But if only half a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts ’Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.  But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole.  If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along.  Now leave—and take your half-a-man with you”—tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.

You may not find Sherburn an admirable individual, but he has his finger on the pulse of the mob. We should consider his example the next time we encounter a fashionable non-conformist.