Unz likes his bedfellows strange – as he demonstrated in 1998 by teaming up with self-professed "liberal" gadfly Alice Callaghan, who organized the Ninth Street School boycott in Los Angeles. His alliance with Rita Montero, however, is in a class by itself. It might just blow up in his face.

Unveiling the initiative alongside Unz in a June 19 press conference, Montero denounced bilingual education as "the last bastion of the Chicano movement." Too bad that press accounts omitted details of her own radical past. 

In May 1974, six of Montero's friends were killed by explosions in Boulder while – according to police – they were assembling car bombs. Two days after the second blast, Montero herself was arrested following a high-speed chase. Police searched her car and found a suspicious timer they said could be used in bomb-making. She denied involvement with any terrorist activity, however, and refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigation. She was never charged. 

The story – first reported in 1995 by Westword, a Denver area publication – does not seem to have diminished Montero's standing among her new conservative allies.