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Stephen Moore’s Columns Deriding Women Raise New Questions for Trump Fed Pick

Stephen Moore of The Heritage Foundation is a likely nominee for the Federal Reserve Board.Credit...Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

WASHINGTON — Stephen Moore built a career in conservative media by championing tax cuts and leaning into the culture wars, bashing “radical feminists” and bloated government with equal zeal. His writings helped him land a promised nomination to the Federal Reserve from President Trump, but they could hurt his chances at Senate confirmation, if Mr. Trump officially nominates him.

Mr. Moore’s long paper and video trail contains potential roadblocks to confirmation — particularly a history of writing about women in unflattering terms. His writings contain language that sometimes echoes Mr. Trump’s past comments about women on shock radio and on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Republican senators have shown less tolerance for such sentiments from some of Mr. Trump’s nominees than they have from the president himself.

“Colleges are places for rabble-rousing,” Mr. Moore wrote for The Washington Times in a 2000 column bemoaning what he called the oppression of white men on campus. “For men to lose their boyhood innocence. To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts. (At the University of Illinois, we used to say that the best thing about Sunday nights was sleeping alone.) It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood. And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?”

In the piece, Mr. Moore counseled parents against sending their daughters to schools that devote resources to women’s studies and black history programs.

Mr. Moore, in a column reprinted in The Ottawa Citizen in 1998, complained about coed youth soccer games, which he called “a giant social experiment imposed upon us by the geniuses that have put women in combat in the military.”

“No one seems to care much that coed sports is doing irreparable harm to the psyche of America’s little boys,” he wrote. He called a kindergartner named Kate Lynn, who was in his son’s soccer league, “Secretariat in pigtails.”

Mr. Moore’s more recent writings include an early version of what has become a popular argument among some conservative media figures, such as the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, that rising wages for women could have adverse consequences for men — and society.

In 2014, Mr. Moore critiqued a Democratic proposal to combat gender discrimination in a column for National Review. “The crisis in America today isn’t about women’s wages; it’s about men’s wages,” he wrote.

“What are the implications of a society in which women earn more than men?” he wrote. “We don’t really know, but it could be disruptive to family stability. If men aren’t the breadwinners, will women regard them as economically expendable? We saw what happened to family structure in low-income and black households when a welfare check took the place of a father’s paycheck. Divorce rates go up when men lose their jobs.”

In a series of columns for National Review in the early 2000s, Mr. Moore mocked female athletes and proposed, in what he says was a joke, that women be barred from officiating, announcing or even serving beer at N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament games. “Is there no area in life where men can take vacation from women?” he wrote in 2002. “What’s next? Women invited to bachelor parties? Women in combat? (Oh yeah, they’ve done that already.)”

Mr. Moore is a longtime economic commentator and writer, who has worked for conservative think tanks and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and he founded the anti-tax Club for Growth. He did not respond to several requests for comment on Tuesday about his past writings, many of which are available in online archives and news databases.

In an appearance on Tuesday on a North Dakota radio show, Mr. Moore said his critics are “pulling a Kavanaugh against me,” in a reference to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, whose Supreme Court confirmation hearings were dominated by testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, who said Mr. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were both in high school. Mr. Kavanaugh disputed the claims and denied he ever assaulted her, rallying Republican senators to his defense.

Mr. Moore has retained a Virginia public relations firm that supported Mr. Kavanaugh during his hearings.

“I was so honored when I got the call from Donald Trump,” Mr. Moore said on the radio program. “But you know, all it’s been since then is one personal assault after another, a kind of character assassination that has nothing to do with economics. But you know, my divorce 10 years ago, or something I wrote 25 years ago. They have six full-time investigative reporters looking into me at The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN. You know Scott, I kind of wear it as a badge of honor, that they’re so afraid of me.”

While many of Mr. Moore’s columns are written with sarcasm, they contain controversial statements that could raise questions about Mr. Moore’s actual views toward women. Mr. Moore has already been criticized by Democrats for his failure to pay more than $300,000 in child support to his former wife, Allison Moore, which resulted in Mr. Moore being held in contempt of court in 2013.

Mr. Moore has also been criticized as a loyalist for Mr. Trump who will largely be a proxy for the president at the Fed.

“We already knew Stephen Moore was unqualified, and every day we learn more about just how dangerous his extreme views are,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the Banking Committee, said on Tuesday in response to revelations from Mr. Moore’s past columns. “He has no business making monetary and regulatory policy that will impact the lives of people across the country.”

Some Capitol Hill Republican aides said this week that Mr. Moore’s writings about women could hurt his chances with female Republican senators and vulnerable incumbents running for re-election next year. On Monday, Mr. Trump’s other pick for the Fed, Herman Cain, withdrew his name from consideration after a critical mass of Republican senators said they would not support him. Mr. Cain had been accused by several women of sexual harassment during his 2012 presidential campaign.

Several emails to press offices for Republican senators asking about support for Mr. Moore went unanswered on Tuesday. A spokesman for Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who opposed Mr. Cain, said in an email that Ms. Murkowski was “in the vetting stage” with Mr. Moore.

The White House has also stayed largely quiet about Mr. Moore, other than to say he is undergoing a background check.

[Read excerpts from Mr. Moore’s columns.]

In 2017, Mr. Moore drew criticism from fellow panelists during a discussion of sexual harassment on CNN, where he passed along what he said had been advice from a leading corporate executive: not to meet with a woman without a third-party present.

“He said to me about two or three years ago something that I thought was very good advice for people who run companies,” Mr. Moore said, “and this is very good advice, is that I would never have a meeting with a woman without someone else in the room. You all — and this is — unfortunately, this is where we’re at today. If you are in a position of power, a Bill O’Reilly, a Donald Trump, anyone who is running a company, you cannot be —”

His fellow panelists cut him off, saying such a policy could negatively affect women.

“If you’re in a position of power,” Mr. Moore said, “it’s probably not a good idea.”

In the early 2000s, Mr. Moore wrote several parodies of the traditional family Christmas letter, in which he referred to himself in the third person as “Steve” and listed various complaints about his family. In 2001, he wrote that he had bought a new Camaro convertible, and that his young children were impeding his attempts at “hitting on girls” while driving around:

“On more than one occasion Steve has been cruising around town with the top down and a gorgeous 20-something blond has pulled up beside him: he looks longingly at her, she gives him a ‘come hither look,’ and then the mood is spoiled when she sees David drooling in the baby seat and then Justin and Will start making weird faces at her,” he wrote.

“She sticks her finger in her mouth and zooms off and Steve is left screaming at the kids: ‘How many times do I have to tell you tyrants to stay out of sight when I’m hitting on girls?’ And then Will, with a puzzled look on his face says, ‘but daddy, we already have a mommy.’ And then Steve says, ‘Yes, but imagine, just for a moment, how nice it would be if you had a much younger mommy.’”

On Tuesday, a reporter asked a White House spokesman if Mr. Trump had spoken with Mr. Moore and still had confidence in his possible nomination.

“I don’t know that he’s spoken with him,” said the spokesman, Hogan Gidley, “but we don’t have any announcements.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: For Fed Nominee, a Crass and Ribald Paper Trail. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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