SACRAMENTO, CA - The California Assembly will soon have a new Speaker, Fabian Nuñez, billed as a conciliatory liberal. He is actually a left-wing militant with a record of shrill rhetoric and pitting Californians against each other based on ethnicity.

Nuñez is from San Diego and studied education and political science at upscale Pitzer College in Claremont. After graduating, he told the Los Angeles Times, "I was ready to join the Sandinistas,'' a curious aspiration.

By 1988 the Sandinista dictatorship had made Nicaragua one of the most repressive regimes in the Americas, denounced by human rights organizations and shunned by prominent American liberals and leftists alike. However, instead of helping the Sandinista comandantes build socialism, Mr. Nuñez became an activist with One Stop Immigration in Los Angeles.

This was the group that in October of 1994 staged a huge rally against Proposition 187, complete with speakers denouncing "AmeriKKKa'' and "the United Snakes of America.'' That month, Mr. Nuñez spearheaded a student walkout at Ganesha High School in Pomona. The school board had already passed a resolution against Prop 187 but Mr. Nuñez charged that they had not done enough. The demonstration included anti-gay rhetoric but Mr. Nuñez told reporters that Latinos were not capable of discrimination. That would surprise residents of Cuba.

Mr. Nuñez was also a backer of the Coordinadora '96 that staged the "Dia de la Raza'' march in Washington, a blast of anti-American rhetoric. As the LA Weekly noted last year, Fabian Nuñez was mentored by Bert Corona, a Marxist firebrand whose left-wing labor activism began before the Nazi-Soviet Pact. None of this emerged from the recent Sacramento Bee profile touting Mr. Nuñez as the new speaker.

Mr. Nuñez duly became political director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and government affairs director for the Los Angeles Unified School District. "I have no interest in running for office,'' Mr. Nuñez told reporters in 1994. But last year he won an Assembly seat in the 46th District in Los Angeles, the only elected office he has ever held. He backed the measure to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

In the class-struggle mindset of the immigration militants, Californians are not one people but divided into oppressed Latino workers - in 1994, Nuñez told the Los Angeles Times that "Latino workers are the modern-day slaves of Southern California'' - and a bourgeoisie of malevolent "anglos,'' a designation that includes people with names such as O'Reilly, Horowitz, and Schwarzenegger. Though advertised as progressive, this brand of politics is rather antiquated and shared neither by most Latinos nor the broader populace. California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187 and opposition to driver's licenses for illegals helped propel Arnold Schwarzenegger into office.

Latino voters in Santa Ana last year voted overwhelmingly to recall school-board member Nativo Lopez, whose profile and rhetoric is similar to that of Fabian Nuñez. The voters wanted neither bilingual education nor divisive anti-American rhetoric. Many made it clear they resented activists who claimed to speak for them.

Since Fabian Nuñez is one of those, Californians should not be surprised if the atmosphere of cooperation that has existed since the election quickly disappears. But perhaps some reporter will ask Speaker Nuñez if the Sandinistas ever did anything with which he disagreed.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at lbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.