From Promise to Betrayal: The Class of ’75

SANTA CLARITA, CA - In 1975, as the Hart High Class of 1975 stepped into the world, the country itself was in upheaval. Nixon had resigned the year before in disgrace. The Vietnam draft had ended in 1973, and by April 1975, even draft registration was suspended. The Equal Rights Amendment was at the center of political debate, promising women a new era of equality. We were graduating into a nation already redefining itself.

Fifty years later, we gathered again. At the front of the hall stood a memorial table with twenty photographs, though the truth was harsher. Of our 500 classmates, at least fifty are gone—one in ten erased by cancer, heart disease, drugs, or despair. The glossy pictures reminded me of the newspaper spreads of young Marines killed in combat—faces frozen in vitality, now reduced to symbols of fragility.

The reunion itself was a microcosm of America. About 150 of us, mostly white, married suburbanites in our late sixties, gathered at Hart & Main, a once-gas station turned mid-century modern event hall. The air conditioning was nonexistent, so attendees waved cooler air on themselves using the small hand fans on the tables. The smell of beer from the bar mixed with carne asada from the taco grill. “LGBTQ-friendly” signs around the venue whispered the cultural politics of the present. Looking around, everyone seemed so tall. Or maybe I had shrunk, or worse, locked in poor posture.

Despite the nostalgia and mourning, I thought three great truths stood out: the collapse of blue-collar whites, the corrosive impact of affirmative action, and the consequences of illegal immigration.

1. The Class Divide

The missing faces told another truth. The blue-collar classmates—once destined for factories, garages, or retail—were largely gone. National data confirm it: working-class whites without college degrees have been ravaged by “deaths of despair”—alcohol, opioids, and suicide. Their absence was louder than any speech.

Meanwhile, those who thrived clustered in comfortable security. The teachers, government administrators, and aerospace retirees were easy to spot. They had pensions, second homes, and the assurance of stability. They had been preserved by unions, bureaucracies, and Cold War defense contracts.

One classmate, tooth gaps marking decades of neglect, grinned as if fresh from prison and told me every single friend he’d had in high school was already dead. His confession hung in the air as a verdict on class division.

Charles Murray described this in Coming Apart: the split of white America into two worlds—one stable, professional, educated, and the other sinking into family breakdown and despair. Our reunion was the proof. No drunken antics, no acting out. The addicts and alcoholics had already been buried. The survivors carried themselves with the quiet reserve of people who had endured, but without joy.

2. The Impact of Affirmative Action

The third truth cut deepest. Affirmative action reshaped opportunity—and erased merit. Nationally, surveys show whites increasingly see themselves as disadvantaged; one Harvard Business School study found 11% rated anti-white bias at the highest level, compared with just 2% for anti-black bias. I didn’t need surveys. I lived it.

In high school, I was the prodigy: the highest PSAT score in the school, three track records, the graduation speaker, and a newspaper columnist who learned early how to use words to gain influence—even once trying to use it to get out of a traffic ticket on prom night. (That gambit failed, but it showed how early I was experimenting with power.) I earned a Ph.D. at Cornell. My dissertation later won a national award as the best in my field. Yet the same year I was honored, Williams College stripped me from the tenure track, citing the “low quality” of that very thesis. The real reason was simpler: I was the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong ideology.

The white professors who wanted fewer white guys in tenure track positions never considered resigning themselves. Instead, they callously created a world in which the price of change was borne by the poor but talented white kids who should have climbed the ladder. My story was only one among millions.

3. Immigration, Crime, and Declining Results

Hart High itself has become another microcosm. In 1975, our class was overwhelmingly white. Today, the school is nearly two-thirds Hispanic and barely one-quarter white. The results are undeniable.

California’s own data consistently show that white students score far higher than Hispanic students in English and math. If Hart High were still majority white, its test scores would place it among the very best schools in Los Angeles County. Instead, overall averages are dragged downward, not because the teachers suddenly got worse, but because the demographics changed. The academic excellence that once propelled so many of my classmates into STEM careers and aerospace has been diluted.

The same is true for crime. Common sense tells us—and national crime data confirm—that violent crime rates are significantly lower for non-Hispanic whites than for Hispanics. Back when Santa Clarita was overwhelmingly white, crime was so rare we hardly locked our doors, and murder was virtually unheard of. Today, the sheriff’s blotter is busier. Santa Clarita remains safer than Los Angeles as a whole, but it is not the all-white suburb I grew up in. The “deaths of despair” among our white working-class classmates were tragic enough; adding in higher baseline crime from mass immigration has left the community doubly weakened.

Conclusion: Rescued, But Too Late

The night ended as it began, with the memorial table. My classmates remembered me as I had been at 18: funny, compassionate, ambitious, a boy with promise. They weren’t wrong. I had been that young man. But government oppression knocked him down again and again until only the scarred man stood in the room.

And yet, America has finally admitted the truth. The students who died did not live long enough to see Donald Trump and the Supreme Court push back against woke ideology and anti-white reverse discrimination. Their entire lives were lived under a system that denied them fairness. Trump proved there was always a better way. He built his rise on our pain. But for us, the Class of 1975, the rescue came too late.

I listened to their praise of my 18-year-old self with objective distance. It was as if they were describing an idealized boy who was now dead too, lying in spirit alongside the fifty classmates whose photographs glowed on the table.

The Class of 1975 was Santa Clarita’s promise. And we were betrayed.

John C. Drew, Ph.D., is a political scientist and former college professor who earned his doctorate in government from Cornell University. As a young Marxist, he met and debated Barack Obama in 1980. His firsthand account of Obama’s early ideological views has been cited in Rising Star (2017) by David Garrow and Radical-In-Chief (2010) by Stanley Kurtz and reported directly in Obama’s True Legacy (2023), edited by Jamie Glazov.

Obama’s Goldyn Glow-Up: The Truth Behind the Spin

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA - Like television serial killer Dexter Morgan in yet another improbable reboot, Barack Obama keeps
getting resurrected by the legacy media—not as he was, but as the character they need him to be.

With their full cooperation, he has carefully crafted a public image tailored to middle-of-the-road sensibilities—one that conceals the more radical and uncomfortable truths about his early life. His latest reflections on his relationship with Lawrence Goldyn, his gay college professor at Occidental, are no exception.

According to Obama, Goldyn was a kind-hearted intellectual who helped broaden his perspective on gay people. But I knew both men during that era, and I can say with confidence: this is not the full story—not even close.

When I met Barack Obama during his sophomore year at Occidental College in December 1980, he struck me as a quiet, intensely self-conscious young man. Unlike most of the male students I encountered, he showed no apparent interest in women. In fact, my immediate impression was that he was gay.

It’s no surprise to me that Obama chose Lawrence Goldyn as his academic advisor. Goldyn, openly gay and politically active, was known on campus as a trusted figure among gay and lesbian students. He wasn’t just a professor—he was part of a broader network of support for students wrestling with their sexual identity.

Unlike the other professors in young Obama’s orbit, Goldyn was not a Marxist. Although Occidental employed him as an assistant professor of political science, his most memorable role was that of an in-your-face sexual revolutionary. For that very reason, I remember thinking Occidental made the right call when it denied him tenure in 1981.

Obama’s recent comments suggest that Goldyn enlightened him on gay identity. But this spin is merely a gentle pirouette designed to distract us from a more substantial pattern.

Obama didn’t need anyone to explain gay culture to him—he was already immersed in it. According to Mia Marie Pope, who claims she knew Obama while he was a student at the exclusive Punahou School in Hawaii, he was frequently in the company of older white gay men and seemed completely at ease in that world.

Obama’s mentor back then, Frank Marshall Davis—a known Communist Party member—authored a book under a pseudonym that included graphic bisexual scenes. These were the kinds of influences Obama had before he ever stepped foot on Occidental’s rose-covered quad.

We also have Obama’s bizarre poem “Pop,” published in 1981, full of unsettling references to “amber stains” and “smell his smell” connectivity—an earthy piece some have interpreted as a veiled account of sexual intimacy with an older man.

Thanks to presidential historian David Garrow, we’ve learned that Obama wrote letters to his then-girlfriend Alex McNear in which he openly discussed his same-sex desires. Former classmates also recall his metrosexual style, soft-spoken voice, and emotional distance from women. This wasn’t a guy discovering gay identity through a class—it was someone already deep in the experience, possibly trying to make sense of it all.

The Goldyn story is just one more example of Obama rewriting his past to fit a more electable narrative. Just as he has airbrushed his Marxist sympathies, blurred his religious convictions, and replaced real individuals with fictional “composites” in Dreams from My Father, here he repackages an advisor-student relationship to appear as a moment of enlightened tolerance—when in fact it may have been something far more personal.

Let me be clear: I’m not interested in shaming Obama for his sexuality, whatever it may be. I am simply done with the absurd, unrepentant, self-curated mythmaking.

If a conservative candidate had maintained this level of personal obfuscation—on issues of sexuality, ideology, or even basic biography—the press would have diced them up into nine pieces as quickly as Dexter Morgan logs a souvenir blood sample. Meanwhile, the legacy media lets Obama escape the truth of his past the same way the law enforcement officers do in Dexter: Resurrection—by misreading every clue that points to guilt, simply because the show must go on and the franchise must be protected.

The real Obama chose Lawrence Goldyn for the same reason other gay and questioning students did—because he felt a personal connection, not because he needed an education in tolerance. That’s not a crime. But pretending otherwise is part of a larger deception—the effort to protect Obama’s personal credibility and to prevent any alteration in how he is portrayed in U.S. history—as America’s first post-racial technocrat, rather than someone who intentionally rebranded to achieve power.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist. This article was first published in American Thinker on July 23, 2025.