NEW CIVILITY WATCH (See update below): On the Lesson Plan at Appalachian State University in North Carolina: ‘If a Few of the Worst Republican Politicians Were Assassinated, it Wouldn’t Be the End of the World.’

UPDATE: An Insta-reader who is one of the course instructors sent us this email:

Here’s more context on that survey in the story you reblogged.

Haidt’s site on morals has many surveys. We assigned one called “Moral Foundations Questionnaire.”  You can find the survey yourself if you register at yourmorals.org (note: we used the original in the lower section, not the revised one in the upper). The student took the “Political and Social Attitudes” survey instead. You can see that the two are totally different–and the one we assigned does not contain the “there is no right answer” language to which the parents objected.

To put the latter survey in context, for decades political psychologists have talked about ‘right-wing authoritarianism’ but not left-wing authoritarianism. This survey is one attempt by researchers (at Emory, apparently) to reverse that bias and measure left-wing authoritarianism. That’s why there aren’t any opposite questions. They’re trying to measure how intolerant the Left is, not the Right,

In short, the innocuous-sounding “political and social values” survey appears designed to collect academic-journal-publishable survey evidence to document that arguments like those in Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism or Dreher’s “Pink Terror” thesis are correct.

Glad to hear it; hopefully Townhall will update the story at the above link as well.

(Updated and bumped.)