Trump's Fed pick wants to ban women from college basketball games

Stephen Moore, Trump’s pick to serve on the Federal Reserve, wants to completely ban women from college basketball games.

“Here’s the rule change I propose: No more women refs, no women announcers, no women beer venders, no women anything,” Moore wrote in 2002. On Monday, CNN unearthed this and several other sexist articles Moore wrote between 2001 and 2003.

Moore did have one exception: He would allow women he finds attractive participate. “Women are permitted to participate, if and only if, they look like Bonnie Bernstein,” Moore said in the same column. Bernstein is an accomplished journalist and sports reporter who previously worked as a CBS reporter during the NCAA basketball games. Moore made the lurid suggestion that she wear a halter top while reporting.

Moore’s reason for wanting to ban women? So “men can take vacation from women.”

In a 2001 column, Moore went so far as to say women announcers were sacrilegious.

“Another problem is that CBS now has women announcers and commentators. Is nothing sacred?” he asked.

In response to CNN, Moore claimed his repeated sexist comments were all just jokes, calling his numerous articles about the topic “spoofs.”

“I have a sense of humor,” Moore said.

One way Moore expressed his “humor” was to insult tennis players like Venus Williams, Martina Hingis, and Monica Seles for having the audacity to make money from their ability to play tennis.

“If there is an injustice in tennis, it’s that women like Martina Hingis and Monica Seles make millions of dollars a year, even though there are hundreds of men at the collegiate level (assuming their schools haven’t dropped the sport) who could beat them handily,” Moore wrote in 2000. “Venus Williams is a multi-millionaire not in spite of the fact that she is a women, but precisely because she’s a woman,” Moore added.

Hilarious.

The sexist columns are only the latest controversy surrounding Moore. He previously used his famous sense of humor to makes “jokes” about AIDS patients and mangled corpses. In one column, he “joked” that one of his children wrote an essay proposing to “round up all blue state liberals, sterilize them, disenfranchise them, and place them into reeducation internment camps.”

And he once laughed at his own racist “joke” he told a reporter.

He’s also been caught cheating on his taxes — unless he was just playing a joke on the IRS by not paying more than $75,000 he owes.

Moore has a long and troubling record that is already raising questions about whether he can actually be confirmed. The latest revelations that he has objectified and insulted women as part of his writing isn’t likely to help, even if it does help explain why Trump is such a fan of his work.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.