It appears that perennial Republican house candidate and tabloid-worthy fuckup Omar Navarro has learned no lesson in his six years as one of California’s least-popular political misogynists. Even the Gateway Pundit, a blog that suggested the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was a conspiracy of the “deep state,” has distanced itself from Navarro after his arrest over the weekend.
The 30-year-old Navarro, who has claimed support from such political luminaries as Roger Stone and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was taken in by San Francisco police on Saturday night on charges of felony stalking, criminal threats, and attempted extortion, as reported by The Daily Beast. Navarro is currently running for the third time against California Representative Maxine Waters, despite receiving less than 23% of the vote in 2018 and being the subject of several messy and highly publicized incidents since he began his political career as a last-place candidate for city council in 2014.
As the Beast notes, in addition to a slate of felony charges Navarro is looking at an additional misdemeanor for allegedly violating a restraining order filed by his ex-girlfriend, DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, earlier this year. In an interview with the Beast, Tesoriero said Navarro threatened to leak her address to antifa activists and offered her money to marry him: “He would have stolen my cats,” she said.
Tesoriero, who is also running for Congress against Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said she called the police after she saw Navarro lurking around her house and received a text from an unknown number reading “Bitch, I came to see you.” Given that Navarro was convicted of attaching an electronic tracking device to his ex-wife’s car in 2016 and later told the press he had “no idea” using such technology without consent was illegal, this should come as no huge shock.
The anger management classes Navarro was ordered to undergo following the tracking incident appear to have had no great impact on the raging far-right candidate’s reasoning skills or violent proclivities: Navarro, who was once referred to as “Trump’s California mini-me,” is a former used car salesman who served as a volunteer traffic commissioner in Torrance, California until he was forced to resign following accusations that he pepper-sprayed a child at a pro-sanctuary cities rally. A year later, following his failed bid to join city council and during his first ill-considered campaign to unseat Waters, he released a sloppy forged letter on Waters’ letterhead he claimed showed his opponent corresponding with the Council on American-Islamic Relations about launching a “resettlement” program in Los Angeles—a letter in which the FBI took a brief interest.
And, exhaustingly, earlier this year the candidate was involved in a very public spat with a group of his racists-in-arms, alleging on Twitter that Tesoriero was “doing cocaine” and “sleeping with Proud boys,” further clarifying that his by-that-point ex-girlfriend “used the proud boys to threaten my life with eminent danger [sic] because I said I would expose the cocaine use including hers.” (This followed a fight in a restaurants and was bookended by allegations of Navarro being a “punk-ass-bitch,” the full details of which you can read at another story in the Beast, if you can possibly muster the patience.) In August, Tesoriero, who is the author of the self-published book Making Love Great Again!: The New Road to Reviving Romance and Winning at Relationships, secured a five-year restraining order against Navarro after receiving “endless threats” in person and over text.
None of this appears to have deterred Navarro, given recent charges, nor has it sated his appetite for doing the opposite of what any reasonable person might do: Reached for comment on his arrest by the Beast, Navarro told the publication: “Men in this country get treated unjustly, too, you have to acknowledge that. Just because a woman says something doesn’t mean it’s true.”
He added that Tesoriero had violated Ronald Regan’s “11th commandment,” which warned against conservatives criticizing each other publicly. Perhaps, if the 11th commandment were indeed upheld, it would have prevented Navarro from collecting almost $1.2 million in campaign contributions instead of being used to deflecting the candidate’s responsibility for his own menace.