Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

The setting of the story is Phoenix, Arizona, a city that is made up of a plethora of natural wonders and a diverse, rich culture. However, our city also has a large population of undocumented citizens, gang violence, social segregation, drug trade activity, and political polarization. Recently, immigrants and minorities have been blamed for most of these problems. The origins of crime and the drug trade must be addressed, so that incoming immigrants have a fair opportunity at the American Dream. Americans must understand this, as we are a nation of immigrants, and knowing our history will ground us in our identity, as well as redirect us to our core values. I decided to write this rap musical for the people in the ghettoes all around the world, but especially for the people in my barrio. To know where we are headed, it helps to know where we come from.

Turning Point USA’s “Exposing Critical Racism Tour” website incorporates imagery and language to purport an alternate reality of critical race theory (critical race theory) in opposition to intellectuals in order to incite an ideological war against teachings of intellectuals. In order to create a sound argument and analysis of the historical and political framework constituted within their page and advertisements, I introduce a bridge between the largely political theory of anti-intellectualism and the rhetorical theory of rhetorical narrative. I propose Anti-Intellectualist Narrative Theory (ANT) as a new theoretical lens for analyzing the nationalistic and populist rhetorical frame created by an extensive history of oppositions to individuals who purport an intellectual authority over the common people. In constructing ANT, I aim to recognize how anti-intellectualism functions as a rhetorical narrative through three rhetorical strategies: anti-rationality, anti-elitism, and unreflective instrumentalism.

This project focuses on the effects of partisanship and electoral contestation on the likelihood of state legislators to adopt an independent ethics commission. Existing literature suggests that ethics reform is a function of public perception and the need to assuage public outrage in the face of scandal. Additionally, many legislators view ethics laws as suggestions of their own ineptitude and thus resist reform. However, this existing view fails to consider the unique nature of the enabling legislation of ethics commissions and often conflates external, public drivers of reform with internal drivers personal to the individual legislators. Using logistic regression and time series analysis, this project finds that increased durations of single-party control in state legislatures decreases the chances of that legislature having an independent commission, suggesting that legislators use the partisan ethics committees as political weapons when they are in power. When the dominant party does not face the risk of becoming the minority, there is little in place to motivate ethics reform, thus the lack of commissions. This research identifies the need to develop more focused measures of inter-legislator partisanship and suggests that the effects of different types of ethics laws, specifically those pertaining to ethics commissions, should more often be studied in isolation, rather than as one single category.