Katherine Boyle

And so I'm a pretty conspiratorial person.

I think there's been a concerted attack on the family to strengthen the state, particularly for the last 50 years.

But it's been done in very specific ways, in legal ways, through the education system, through the medical system.

And it is deliberately destroyed.

And you see it through the birth rate, like we talked about in the beginning.

Fewer and fewer people want to have families.

And it's because of this deliberate attack on the family.

And I wrote this piece called The War on Suffering where I've been very vocal about the fact that I think everything in America changed in 1973.

There's this website called WTF Happened in 1971.

And it points to that's when we came off the gold standard, that's when regulations started exploding in America, what happened in this year where everything bad in America started from this moment where you just see just complete change in a lot of things around America.

And I've always said that that might have been the economic change that happened in America where financialization started and where housing became so expensive, where it became ridiculously expensive to afford health care or education.

But in 1973, there were two things that radically changed how Americans view themselves, how men and women view themselves, and ultimately what I think is sort of the impetus and start of this sort of unraveling of the family.

And I've said this a lot publicly on what I think changed for men, which was 1973 in January, Nixon did the most profound and most popular thing that he ever did during his presidency, which was that he ended the draft.

It was, it was unanimous.

It was, you know, coming off of Vietnam.

It was like a unanimous thing that everyone loved.

Everyone knew what needed to happen, where he said, we're going to be an all volunteer force.

And we're going to, you know, we're going to allow people to choose to serve their country.

And of course, this is something that even today people, you know, our military celebrates the fact that we don't have a draft, that, you know, this is, this is part of American culture.

But I think what it fundamentally said to young people is that there's a choice to serve.