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The epicenter of the Republican intraparty battles was in northern Kentucky where the shakeups occurred.

FRANKFORT, Ky. Three prominent Kentucky House Republicans were defeated in bruising GOP primaries that reflected growing pains within the state's dominant political party.

Several other incumbent GOP lawmakers successfully fended off tough challenges on Tuesday.

The epicenter of the Republican intraparty battles was in northern Kentucky where the shakeups occurred. State Rep. Adam Koenig was unseated by Steven Doan. Rep. C. Ed Massey lost to Steve Rawlings, while Rep. Sal Santoro was defeated by Marianne Proctor.

Republican Senate Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, in sizing up the three races, said Wednesday that a libertarian-populist narrative worked in a very, very low turnout election.

Koenig and Massey were committee chairmen while Santoro had a key role in setting transportation spending as a budget review subcommittee chairman. Koenig also gained prominence for leading the push to legalize sports betting in Kentucky an effort that came up short again this year.

Incumbent GOP lawmakers fared much better elsewhere in the state. State Sen. Donald Douglas defeated challenger Andrew Cooperrider in a high-spending primary. Other incumbents who won closely watched primaries included Reps. Kim King, Brandon Reed and Samara Heavrin.

Asked to assess the overall primary season, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear on Wednesday said: "What I'm seeing are nastier primaries. And we need to get beyond nasty elections in general. I don't wish some of the mailers that I saw on anybody.

Beshear is preparing for his own tough reelection fight next year.

With Republicans so dominant across much of Kentucky, winning the GOP primary in many districts is tantamount to securing a legislative seat. It has resulted in some hotly contested races.

I dont see a huge message in this primary other than it was the first of many where virtually all the action of import will be in May GOP primaries, said Scott Jennings, a Kentuckian and former adviser to President George W. Bush. Weve become so dominant so fast, and the GOP will have to reckon with these internal fights for many years to come.

Republican supermajorities in Kentucky's legislature include lawmakers characterized as business-oriented conservatives, social conservatives and libertarians. Many of their views overlap on such issues as gun rights, low taxes and opposition to abortion. Some of this year's GOP primaries pitted traditionally conservative incumbents against libertarian-minded challengers.

What you're seeing is just growing pains because the Republican Party is growing in Kentucky, Reed said in an interview Wednesday at the state Capitol.

Reed, the vice chairman of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, won his primary with nearly 70% of the vote in his rural district. Reed emphasized the primary victories by lawmakers aligned with the traditional party which he said has reshaped Kentucky policies since the GOP won total control of the legislature after the 2016 election.

Asked if he saw room in the party for libertarians, Reed replied: I think there's room in the Republican Party for Republicans. If you want to be a libertarian, you probably need to go join the Libertarian Party and run as a libertarian.

While the losses among the three northern Kentucky lawmakers garnered considerable attention, Thayer pointed to the success of other GOP incumbents in Tuesday's legislative primaries.

"Most incumbents were rewarded for their work passing a lot of priority conservative legislation over the last couple of years," Thayer said in a phone interview.

Primary losses by Koenig and Massey will create openings for two committee chairmanships. Koenig has been chairman of the House Licensing, Occupations and Administrative Regulations Committee. Massey wielded influence as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The outcomes of GOP primaries, both this year and in likely contested primaries in coming years, could factor into the divides that sometimes surface in the legislature on such issues as charter schools and whether to legalize sports betting and medical marijuana.

With Koenig's defeat, another lawmaker will have to step up as the primary sponsor of legislation to legalize sports betting in Kentucky.

It's important that we elect people to all offices that can help us get things done, Beshear said in an interview at the statehouse. That are willing to put differences aside and push forward on key issues like sports betting and medical marijuana. Their time has come and we need to make sure that we are electing people who believe in them.

Elsewhere, GOP voters settled two incumbent-vs.-incumbent primaries -- the result of a new House redistricting map passed as a result of statewide population shifts reflected in the 2020 U.S. census.

In western Kentucky, Rep. Jim Gooch Jr. defeated fellow Rep. Lynn Bechler. In a newly drawn eastern Kentucky district, Rep. Bobby McCool defeated Rep. Norma Kirk-McCormick.

Associated Press Writer Piper Hudspeth Blackburn in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this story.

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'Growing pains' | Northern Kentucky incumbents ousted in legislative primary - WHAS11.com

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When the pandemic hit, the centre-left never forgave Kenney for tailoring his policies to the libertarian-right. The latter, meanwhile, never thanked him. This fact must give pause to every right-of-centre politician in the country.

Jason Kenney drove his famous blue pickup truck on to the Alberta stage, and, Wednesday night, off a political cliff, thus becoming not the Conservative wunderkind, the next federal leader-in-waiting, but a cautionary tale for Conservative politicians in Alberta and indeed across the country.

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His pivot to provincial politics, eschewing a crowded and convoluted field to replace Stephen Harper, had been triumphant. Having so skilfully and affably created the conditions to eat the federal Liberals lunch in the early 2000s by literally eating lunch with minority voters in every gurdwara, mosque and church to which he was sent (voraciously courting a base oft-ignored by the right), he would now unite the fractured right in Alberta, fix the provinces economic woes, restore pipeline supremacy and equally triumphantly return to Ottawa, rescuing the federal movement from its time in time-out.

But if Kenney could do little wrong in Ottawa, his time in Edmonton represented a case of reverse-Midas touch, as if every issue, everything he came into contact with turned to well, not gold.

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It started out well enough. In an election that drew 64 per cent voter turnout, his United Conservative Party earned 55 per cent of the popular vote. Three-in-five Albertans approved of Kenney back then. But by last fall, Kenneys approval had sunk to just 22 per cent. Pretty bad for any politician. Really bad for one facing a mutiny in his own caucus. Rachel Notley and the NDP were now finding a second wind competing with and in some polls pulling ahead of the UCP. (Shell miss him dreadfully, no doubt). In March, the Angus Reid Institute found Albertans dissatisfied with Kenneys government on more than a half-dozen metrics of provincial management, including stewardship of the economy, health care and COVID-19.

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Ah, the coronavirus. Kenneys bte noire. At the height of the troubles, while other provinces closed businesses, instituted mask mandates and insisted on vaccination, Kenneys government resisted and resisted, infuriating massive segments of the Alberta population wanting more protection, all to protect itself from the fury of the libertarian, restriction-resisting factions of its own base. In the end, Kenney pleased no one. Then came last years best summer ever, a premature end to the pandemic declared in Alberta which resulted in a surge of infection.

The centre-left never forgave him. The libertarian-right never thanked him. This is the important point that must now give every right-of-centre politician in the country pause.

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Kenneys successor in Alberta, Doug Ford in Ontario, those vying for control of the federal Conservative party each will continue to grapple with a base that has moved if not farther to the right (after all, Kenney has arguably been one of the most hawkish among them), then to a place more stubbornly resistant to authority, rules or a sense of common care. A place of extremes, felt most keenly by people in Alberta and next door in Saskatchewan but with pockets of growing resonance across the country.

While years of the Trudeau government have left those two western provinces, in particular, feeling profoundly alienated, this resentful disengagement has been more vociferously fed by six years of Trump and Tucker Carlson-style politics an ugly, gaslighting brand of misinformation combined with social media and two years of a pandemic that have legitimized all kinds of anti-government, anti-truth, conspiracy-minded kooks.

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The results? The Ottawa occupation. A front-runner for the federal Conservatives (Pierre Poilievre) who decries racism while at the same time using nativist, dog-whistle-style language in a widely shared video. And a splintering even further of the political right. If the Conservative Party of Canada doesnt go far enough, there is the Peoples Party of Canada federally, the New Blue Party in Ontario and any host of independence-minded parties in Alberta.

By no means am I suggesting all these parties or their supporters subscribe to or amplify toxicity, but some do. The more practical reality is that right-leaning parties must decide if they want to chase some voters farther and farther down a rabbit hole, or remain mainstream enough not to alienate everyone else.

It was the political problem that undid Jason Kenney. He wont be the only one.

Shachi Kurl is President of theAngus Reid Institute,a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation.

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Kurl: COVID, conservatism and the downfall of Alberta's Jason Kenney - Ottawa Citizen

This fall I participated in the annual Frankel Lecture symposium at the University of Houston Law School. The topic was on academic freedom and diversity, and the lecture was delivered by Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School. I provided a response, along with Khiara M. Bridges of Berkeley Law School.

The articles from the symposium have now been published online and printed in the latest issue of the Houston Law Review. The full symposium can be found here.

My article, "Academic Freedom and the Mission of the University," focuses on the relationship between the mission of the university and the commitment to and value of academic freedom to that university. A university dedicated to truth-seeking needs robust protections for academic freedom in order to properly fulfill that mission, and American universities embraced those protections as they reoriented themselves to that mission in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the extent that universities deviate from that mission and prioritize other values and commitments, then academic freedom protections will seem less valuable and even counterproductive.

I particularly consider three competing understandings of what universities should be seeking to prioritize and show that in each case academic freedom will likely suffer. The article explores the implications of committing the university to a "patriotic" mission of promoting a rich set of substantive values seen as central to the nation, committing the university to a "neoliberal" mission of preparing students for career success, and committing the university to a "creedal" mission of promoting a rich set of substantive values seen as important to the campus community such as inclusivity or social justice.

From the conclusion:

Modern American universities have struggled to live up to their own ideals, and our current polarized environment will make living up to those ideals harder rather than easier. The educational reformers of the late nineteenth century understood that if universities were to serve their proper purpose of bringing the benefits of knowledge to society, the experts that the university had to offer would have to be broadly trusted. They could not be perceived as just another set of partisans entering into familiar political battles. That is a hard position to achieve. To the extent that society is divided into distant warring camps, it is all the more difficult to bridge that divide. Scholarly judgment might be vilified and dismissed rather than welcomed. But modern universities were launched with a goal of standing above such divides. Their best chance of doing so requires taking scrupulous care to be intellectually open and nondogmatic, standing above the fray rather than diving into it, and protecting dissident ideas rather than suppressing them.

Read the whole thing here.

Khiara Bridges' article ends on a particularly intriguing note. A critical race theorist, she worries about pressure on academic freedom currently coming from the political left and from the political right. Notably, she emphasizes to the left that universities should not be places that prioritize "student comfort," as some diversity, equity and inclusion offices are wont to do. More curious is her discussion of the threat from the political right. There she notes that conservatives responded to critical race theory arguments about free speech in the 1990s by embracing a more libertarian view of free speech principles. She seems wistful that the political right now seems to be abandoning that libertarianism and adopting a more censorious attitude that more closely mirrors CRT.

She writes:

And what is the best way to respond to pressures on academic freedom generated from the right? It seems like the right might need to remind itself of the claims that it made in the 1990s, when self-identified critical race theorists argued that the First Amendment should not be interpreted to protect racist hate speech. During that historical moment, many conservatives (and liberals) rejected these theorists' claims, arguing that the First Amendment was incompatible with protections against injurious speech. They contended that the best response to harmful speech was not to limit speech but rather to ensure that everyone could speak.

In the 1990s, conservatives wanted more speech. In the 2020s, they want less. If conservative pundits, activists, and scholars really value the First Amendment as much as they claimed just three decades ago, then they should recognize the bans on "Critical Race Theory," "divisive concepts," and the like as the wildly unAmerican efforts that they are.

Is the implication here that CRT was wrong about free speech and that everyone should embrace the civil libertarian position on speech? That in hindsight it was a mistake for the left to have spent the last few decades advocating for a more restrictive understanding of the First Amendment and free speech principles? Indeed that CRT principles regarding free speech were "wildly un-American"? Or that it would be convenient for left-leaning academics if the right were to continue to adhere to liberal speech ideals while the left continues to embrace illiberal speech ideals? That the left should censor but the right should tolerate? Free speech for me but not for thee?

I'd like to think that my colleagues on the left are starting to see the light when it comes to free speech principles and realizing that they were playing with fire in urging an illiberal vision of free speech, but we are not there yet. Instead some are doubling and tripling down on theories about how to restrict speech they do not like. And meanwhile, Bridges is right that some conservatives are turning to the dark side when it comes to free speech. Things are likely to get worse before they get better, and the truth-seeking mission of the university might be curtailed, if not abandoned entirely.

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Academic Freedom and the Mission of the University - Reason

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One of the fallouts from the Federal Reserve's period of monetary expansion during the 2020-2021 period may be connected with the regulation of cryptoassets.

The pricing of cryptoassets had been very uninteresting until the Federal Reserve started to flood the banking system with liquidity.

This was true of what was going on in many other financial markets.

Well, the Fed saved the economy, at that time, from any serious economic catastrophe, but it generated many, many financial bubbles that it is now having to deal with as the Fed reverses its actions.

As the Fed moves to tighten up on its monetary policy so as to fight the current rise of inflation, one by one, we are finding adjustments taking place in the economy to deal with the monetary buildup that took place in various sectors of the financial world.

And, we are finding outcomes that make many uncomfortable.

The initial surge of support for cryptoassets that came from libertarian-thinking individuals has now receded somewhat.

More and more, as evidence grows of misuse or misapplication of the free-market program, we find the other side of the argument taking up more aggressive positions.

For example, columnist Greg Ip, of the Wall Street Journal, writes this morning about how "Crypto Meltdown Exposes Hollowness of its Libertarian Promise."

Mr. Ip writes,

"unable to displace the dollar, crypto became just another asset without traditional markets' guardrails."

Furthermore, the lead editorial in the Financial Times, written by Jemima Kelly, claims, in bold letters, "There is a moral case against crypto."

Ms. Kelly writes,

"it seems more appropriate to use the latest market crash as an opportunity to make the moral argument against crypto. Because it's not just that we should not treat it as a serious asset class; we also need to stop imagining that it is just all a bit of harmless fun."

So, some of the weaknesses of the Libertarian case have come to light.

But, we should not overreact and move too far in the opposite direction.

Yes, crypto markets have lost more than $1.0 trillion of value over the past six months.

The price of one Bitcoin (BTC-USD) was just over $67,000 on November 10, 2021.

Today, the price is right around $30,000, where it was below $26,000 several days ago.

TerraUSD (UST-USD), a token whose price was supposed to remain pegged to the dollar, suddenly dropped, along with the coin (LUNA-USD) that was meant to back it.

We have not fully experienced the full fallout of the recent collapse and await the further ramifications of the unregulated space.

Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission has seen it as his mission to bring regulation to these cryptoassets.

Mr. Gensler is building his case.

After testifying in front of the House Appropriations Committee panel hearing on Wednesday, he told reporters,

"I think a lot of these tokens will fail."

"I fear that in crypto...there's going to be a lot of people hurt, and that will undermine some of the confidence in markets and trust in markets writ large."

Mr. Gensler has his mission set out for him.

Others, like Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are right there with him.

The pieces are all coming together.

Earlier this month, the SEC stated that it plans to add 20 investigators and litigators to its unit dedicated to cryptocurrency and cybersecurity enforcement, nearly doubly the unit's size.

Still, Mr. Gensler does not feel that this is near enough and that more will be added later.

Mr. Gensler, and his predecessor, Jay Clayton, believe that most cryptocurrencies meet the legal definition of a security and thereby should be registered with the SEC,

"There is a path forward," Mr. Gensler claims.

Mr. Gensler is in the process of constructing that path. He is receiving more and more support for this effort these days, and the number of advocates seems to be growing.

To me, this battle is going to grow and grow.

I lean to the side of less regulation than more. But, I believe that one should not just dismiss the need for regulation out of pure philosophical thought.

People cheat. People cut corners. People have incomplete knowledge. Bad things happen. Markets, in general, seem to need to have some kind of a watchdog.

It just makes common sense. In this, I am more of a pragmatist. And, like Cass Sunstein, I believe that the regulation of markets should be done incrementally. That we should work through "nudges."

The problem is, too often, that we wait too long and major problems occur.

In order to put things back into order, we must make major movements.

These major adjustments tend to create their own 'unintended consequences."

And, thus, more problems are introduced into the picture.

Markets need to be regulated.

My old Libertarian days are behind me.

We have a major correction taking place. Many, many people are getting hurt in the adjustment.

We need to have Mr. Gensler and others moving to bring more regulation into the area of cryptoassets so as to avoid even further pain.

The regulation is coming. Let's get on with it.

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More Crypto Regulation: Thank The Federal Reserve - Seeking Alpha