Emily Shire must have been in Madison, where activism is as much a career as “community organizing,” at some point:

Can’t stand man-hating feminists and hippie environmentalists? You’re not the only one.

A new study from the University of Toronto published in the European Journal of Social Psychology shows that feminists, environmentalists, and activists in general may face an uphill battle gaining supporters because no one wants to be associated with their irritating do-gooder ways.

“Unfortunately, the very nature of activism leads to negative stereotyping,” the researchers conclude from a series of experiments testing the perception of and behaviors of individuals toward feminists and environmentalists. “By aggressively promoting change and advocating unconventional practices, activists become associated with hostile militancy and unconventionality or eccentricity.”

One of the University of Toronto experiments asked 228 Americans to describe “typical feminists” and “typical environmentalists.” The most commonly mentioned traits were “man-hating” and “unhygienic” for the former and “tree-hugger” and “hippie” for the latter. Ouch.

In another experiment, 140 Americans were asked to read an article advocating for climate change and sustainable lifestyles. One-third of participants were told it was written by a stereotypically extreme environmentalist (a fake author profile said, “I hold rallies outside chemical plants”); one-third were told it was written by a more moderate environmentalist (this profile said the author “raises money for grass-roots level environmental organizations); the final third were given an author profile that made no mention of environmental activism.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found people were “much less motivated to adopt pro-environmental behaviors” when they were told the author was a stereotypical environmentalist. To add insult to injury, “this dynamic may very well apply across the board, such as to activities advocating gay rights or Wall Street reform,” writes Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard.

It’s a catch-22 for activists because the more involved and passionate they are for a cause, the less likely non-activists are to trust them or be moved by their arguments, say researchers:

This tendency to associate activists with negative stereotypes and perceive them as people with whom it would be unpleasant to affiliate reduces individuals’ motivation to adopt the pro-change behaviors that activists advocate. [Pacific Standard]

But, there is a silver lining… sort of. The study notes that people “may be more receptive to advocates who defy stereotypes by coming across as pleasant and approachable.”

If you can find one, that is.

There is a more simple explanation than just being put off by someone’s communication style, though most people are rightly turned off by self-righteousness and hypocrisy (see Gore, Al, global warming/”climate change”). Maybe, though, it’s not the messenger, it’s the message. If it’s true that most people approach things in moderation, of course most people are going to be put off by extremes, even before thinking through what said obnoxious activist espouses.

Jonah Goldberg:

Last week I wrote a column accusing the president of having a vindictive streak — of deliberately trying to make the lives of average Americans worse just so he could score ideological and political points.

We already knew from how he handled the budget sequester that Obama liked this approach. He ordered Cabinet secretaries not to do their jobs — i.e., to manage as best they could under spending restraints — but instead to find ways to make the cuts needlessly painful for innocents caught in the Beltway crossfire.

They dusted off the same playbook for the shutdown. As one park ranger told the Washington Times, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can.”

Admittedly, the case was circumstantial. There was no smoking gun. What was really needed was a confession.

Obama delivered. On October 8, Obama was asked by Mark Knoller of CBS if he was “tempted” to sign the numerous funding bills passed by the GOP-controlled House that would greatly alleviate the pain of the shutdown. Republicans have voted to reopen parks, fund cancer trials for children at the NIH, and to keep FEMA and the FDA going through this partial shutdown. But Obama has threatened to veto any such efforts, effectively keeping the Senate from considering the legislation.

“Of course I’m tempted” to sign those bills, Obama explained. “But here’s the problem. What you’ve seen are bills that come up wherever Republicans are feeling political pressure, they put a bill forward. And if there’s no political heat, if there’s no television story on it, then nothing happens.”

Obama’s answer dragged on, as all of Obama’s answers do. But the point was made. For the first time in American history, a president confessed to deliberately hurting his country to score points against his enemies.

Which brings us to the national disgrace this week in which the Department of Defense denied death benefits to the families of fallen service members.

White House press secretary Jay Carney insists, with operatic righteousness, that Obama never intended for the 26 families of the fallen to be denied this aid or to be hindered from retrieving their beloveds’ remains from Dover Air Force Base.

But Carney is surely lying — and the evidence isn’t simply that his lips are moving.

Carney defends the administration by noting that the Pentagon warned Congress in late September that the shutdown would prevent the payments from going out.

But Congress passed the Pay Our Military Act to fund the military through the shutdown. Administration officials first stonewalled Congress’s efforts for clarity on the issue, then the lawyers eventually determined that because the act didn’t specifically include the word “benefits,” they couldn’t err on the side of helping grieving families.

In other words, when asked to make a judgment call, and knowing that Congress wanted the benefits paid, this administration still claimed its hands were tied by the fine print. Given how often the White House routinely ignores the plain meaning of the law — and the will of Congress — when it suits its political agenda, logic dictates that it denied the benefits on purpose.

Moreover, by its own account, the White House says it knew for weeks this would happen. During all the back-and-forth, the White House did nothing to remedy the situation. It only sprang into outraged action when suddenly faced with a PR nightmare. …

Let me say it again. The president confessed. It’s his express policy to punish innocent bystanders in order to score partisan points. That order has gone forth like a fatwa to the bureaucracy. And it is only when that policy blows up in his face that Obama becomes “very disturbed.”

When terrible things happened on George W. Bush’s watch — Katrina, Abu Ghraib, etc. — the immediate liberal response was to insist that Bush had in fact ordered or wanted the terrible things to happen.

Now we have a president openly admitting it — and no one seems to care.

Does that strike you as an example of “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Whatever you think of Obama’s 43 predecessors, none of them were fools enough to admit to being fine with hurting the people he’s supposed to serve so that his party can work to destroy the opposition.

Kevin Jackson starts with a bold statement:

Admit it. You want a white Republican president again.

Jackson follows that with:

In the pre-black president era, criticizing the president was simply the American thing to do. An exercise of one’s First Amendment right. Criticism had nothing to do with color, because there had never been a black president, or at least one whom people recognized as black.

So to criticize the president meant that you didn’t like his policies.

The election of a recognized black president was not supposed to change anything. In fact, it was supposed to (1) ease any perceived racial tensions, and (2) allow the government to focus on legislating without race. So America would be more free than ever to discuss the issues.

Not the case. And that is why having a white Republican president is best for the country.

Consider that nobody is ever accused of being racist for disagreeing with white presidents. Mexicans disagreed with most white Republican presidents over America’s immigration policy. Many deranged Mexicans believe we should open the country up to them, some saying that much of America belongs to Mexico anyway. They are not called racists.

Liberal blacks have disagreed with most Republican presidents since Eisenhower, yet these blacks are not considered racists. In fact, when blacks had sanity and disagreed with the policies of racist white Democrat presidents, nobody accused black people of being racists.

Fighting for one’s civil rights was not racist then, nor is it racist now. Blacks (and Republicans) were on the side of righteousness, when they disagreed with the racist policies of Andrew Johnson, and adopted by every Democrat president since.

Never has a black person been called racist, because they didn’t like one of the white presidents’ policies. Blacks were just exercising their First Amendment rights to speak freely. Blacks have disagreed with policy positions of about every Republican president in the modern era, including those who have helped them. …

African-American columnist Joseph Perkins has studied the effects of Reaganomics on black America. He found that, after the Reagan tax cuts gained traction, African-American unemployment fell from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989. Black-owned businesses saw income rise from $12.4 billion in 1982 to $18.1 billion in 1987—an annual average growth rate of 7.9 percent. The black middle class expanded by one-third during the Reagan years, from 3.6 million to 4.8 million.

Real Politics reports Obama’s statistics as follows:

Median family income for black Americans has declined a whopping 10.9 percent during the Obama administration…This decline does not include losses suffered during the financial crisis and the recession that followed, but it instead measures declines since June 2009, when the recession officially ended.

That’s not the only bad news for African-Americans. The poverty rate for blacks is now 25.8 percent. The black labor force participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent. The black unemployment rate, according to Pew Research, stands at 13.4 percent. Among black, male, high school dropouts, PBS’ Paul Salmon reports, the unemployment rate is a staggering 95 percent.

That report was from 2011, and it’s gotten worse since then. Facts don’t lie. Yet blacks want to put Obama on Mt. Rushmore and hang Reagan in effigy.

I don’t think Jackson’s point was actually as bold as his headline. The first comment on this piece says:

I didn’t read the article, just headline that I do not agree with: Dr. Thomas Sowell, Dr. Ben Carson, Dr. Walter Williams, Col. Allen West, Col. Allen West, a LOT, there are so many qualified people that could help lead this country return back to greatness.

I am afraid that Obama has caused people to be apprehensive about another Black President because he encouraged hate between the races so much rather than being a Leader and taking the Country down the right (correct) path to keep us strong and our eye on the real issue other than maxing out his “race card”.

Jackson’s point is that our first mixed-race president has been bad for blacks. (Obama has been bad for whites and every other race too.) Claiming that every criticism of Obama is “Raaaacist!” (and, after that, every criticism of future Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton or U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Not Anywhere I Live) is sexist or, better yet, is misogynist or, in Baldwin’s case, homophobic) is the corollary to Godwin’s Law, the online rule that the side in a debate that calls the other a Nazi automatically loses.

Jackson, by the way, is the author of Sexy Brilliance … and Other Political Lies and The BIG Black Lie. Here is his photo.