IFA Director Speaks on America's Next 250 Years
As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, many Americans are asking not only how to honor the nation's founding, but what kind of country the next generation will inherit.
This address by Frank Kaufmann, Director of the International Freedom Alliance, was presented during the Settlement Project's "250 Years—What's Next? The Just Cause of Realizing America's Destiny" dinner in Southern California on May 31, 2026. The gathering brought together community leaders and citizens to reflect on America's history, its defining ideals, and the responsibilities we gratefully carry as citizens.
In this speech, Kaufmann argues that America's story is an ongoing pursuit of a "more perfect Union," a history marked by sacrifice, moral striving, and renewal. While critiquing ideological movements that have weakened American institutions, he maintains an optimistic vision for national restoration grounded in faith, liberty, and the common good. Looking toward the next 250 years, he calls for a renewed culture of strong families, civic responsibility, and cooperation across cultural differences.
A Vision for America's Next 250 Years
by Frank Kaufmann
Presented at the Settlement Project Dinner,
May 31, 2026, El Segundo, CA,
The Golden Thread of America’s Past
We are a fortunate generation. We stand here tonight at a magnificent turning point in the history of America and the world. As Americans, we are the inheritors of the most daring, beautiful, and successful experiment in history.
For the past 250 years, the American people have marched humbly, but with a relentless spirit, striving, sacrificing, patiently reaching for a “More Perfect Union.”
We did not just build cities; we built monuments to human dignity. In response to the ancient sin of slavery, 360,000 Union heroes lost their lives, becoming a refiner’s fire to burn that institution to the ground, at least on American soil.
When the world was gripped by the demonic madness of National Socialism, or by the gulags and genocide of Marxist power-lust, it was American boys from the farms of Iowa and the streets of Brooklyn who stormed beaches, shivered in the cold, and in silent prayer closed brothers’ still open eyes. American boys and women liberated the camps and brought the light of freedom to millions they had never even met.
Our 250 year history is not a record of perfection. It is a record of faith, repentance, forgiveness and striving. It is a record of progress. It can be called a Coalition of Conscience, of dedicated patriots all seeking the same good.
Black freedom fighters shoulder to shoulder with white allies marched together in Selma under the strict wisdom of Gandhi and King. A thousand men marched in New York in the 1912, parade for women’s suffrage while being mocked and jeered. These men made up a full 10th of those marching.
America has given 100 billion dollars to save millions from disease in distant lands. This is the American heart; our story of beauty and righteous effort.
A Shadow in the Garden
But not every American has shared in this noble struggle. Since the middle of last century, an ever greater number of Americans have poured out heart and soul to pollute, defile, and ravage the honest labors, and prayerful dreams of good Americans. Possessed of dark and divisive ideologies such as Marxism and Wokeism, billions have been poured into efforts to bring rot into our most sacred institutions. While patriots and loving moms and dads were building, others were poisoning our sacred inheritance.
From the radical faculties of our universities to the captured newsrooms and television studios, a systematic Long March has been underway to poison the minds of citizens and especially of young people and college students.
The racist inspired 1619 Project architects tried to convince us that 1776 and 1787 were lies. They want to replace the wonderful harmonious tapestry of proud Americans from every race, culture, and creed with a Hierarchy of Grievance, a victimhood and marginalized Olympics where a tiny few terrorize our whole precious country.
They sought to replace Equality, which our founders recognized as a direct creation of God, with the divisive engine of eternal victimhood and vengeance called “Equity.” A thinly veiled tool for virtue imposters’ lust for power, state control, and perpetuation of the corrupt state-ngo revolving door.
They exploited and invaded K-12 classrooms with anti-American teachings designed to make our children ashamed of our history and turn against our valiant forbears.
They pushed radical, divisive, and twisted gender ideologies that target the most vulnerable among us, our children, pushing hideous and brutal medicine to alter the beautiful reality of biological life. These past years have not been noble political dialogue and contention that was such a great hallmark of American democracy. It is rather a careful strategic design to Demoralize and cripple the American soul. It is a witch’s brew of aggression, victimhood and derangement seeking as its end state control, surveillance and tyranny.
By God’s grace, and by American grit this era of national self-loathing is coming to an end!
The Great Recovery and the Dawn of Harmony
We now stand at the dawn of a Compassionate Rising, an inflection point in our providence! We are looking beyond a Great Recovery. We are ready to claim and realize our next 250 years as what some have openly dreamed of as a Golden Era.
We look to a time of national and international harmony, more beautiful and more prosperous than anything the world has ever seen.
To achieve this, we must take a few new steps. The first is to evolve from being merely Free Individuals to becoming those to embody what that freedom is for. We are created free because this is what makes us capable of acting in love.
But this idea of “love” should not be understood vaguely. There are just 4 ways to be individuals of love. Why did God create us free? Because without Freedom, these great loves cannot arise.
What are these four loves? Just this: 1. Children’s love. We love our moms and dads forever. 2. Siblings love. Again eternal. (Our love for friends lives in the texture of sibling’s love). 3. The love of songs, poetry, passionate longing and moonlit nights. The thrilling love between husbands and wives. And finally, 4. Earth’s greatest mystery is the love we have for our children. Parents’ love.
The heartbeat of the next 250 years will not be found in Washington, but in the American Home. Patriots are created by fathers and mothers. From them we become strong, compassionate, caring, resilient, flexible, and forgiving. This is the foundry of the Republic!
The second needed point of rebirth for our next 250 years must come from our faithful dedication to seek more perfect union.
This is the hour to transcend! We must outgrow the parochialism and the biases that keep us small, and dare I say vulnerable. We must be ready to work across every boundary, even the hardest boundaries of all. By that I mean the boundaries of our religions, our denominations, and our faith families. We don’t need to be the same in any way, even in our dogmas and our theologies. We just have to become people who will never close the door to fellow patriots and believers. Even those with whom we differ.
Until recent months good Americans were surrounded by and drowning in evil, darkness and deceit. It is still buried and trying to act, even though the great disinfectant of light is weakening this dark matrix.
Now is the time to dry up the nutrient sources of hate. Let us allow apologies and repentance and be willing to help those who followed dark ways in ignorance learn the ways of peace.
The first 250 years was a battle to build, and to defend. The next 250 years can be the time to write the American Symphony of liberty and harmony where division is laid to rest, victimhood is neutralized, and the potential of our nation and our allies is unleashed.
We are the Founders now! This is our moment! Under God, with love in our hearts and family as our foundation, we can build a future so bright, so harmonious, and so prosperous, that the world will happily join us to say together: “The best is yet to come!”
God bless you, and God bless the United States of America!
Frank Kaufmann is Director of the International Freedom Alliance, and author of Woke Ideology Critique and Counter Proposal
