Some people find their calling in college. Take for example, Dakota Hall, who began organizing young people while a student at the University of Wisconsin. Hall used his experience mobilizing students to get engaged in the university’s budget process to launch a career helping the youth of Milwaukee, particularly helping people of color as executive director of Leaders Igniting Transformation. On Nov. 30, he took on a new position as executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, which supports civic engagement through a network of local organizations. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
Building and sustaining youth power across the nation with an emphasis on BIPOC leadership.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
I ran for multiple club executive boards in high school and became president of our Green Club and Native American Student Association. Very proud of organizing to get recycling bins in my high school!
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Being a part of the amazing team with Leaders Igniting Transformation in Wisconsin that helped end the school resource officer contracts for Milwaukee Public Schools and got those dollars invested back into the classroom and futures of Black and Brown young people.
And your most disappointing setback?
I grew up politically in Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, and consistently saw cuts to my higher education institution including critical divestment from student services and support services for the most marginalized young people on campus. It took a while, but the same young people who saw cuts in their education were finally able to defeat Walker in the 2018 election. While we suffered setbacks under his leadership, we were able to do some deep organizing to remove him.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
Being a Black and Indigenous male, I center the voices, stories and lives of BIPOC individuals the most. This country was born upon the sins, genocide, and slavery of Black and Indigenous peoples. Our resistance and resilience is the only thing that can set this country up for any sort of foundation that creates an environment for everyone to have the freedom to thrive.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Set time to think about what you want, prioritize your visioning space, build your dreams, follow your heart and remember to center joy.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry’s.
Banana ice cream with Reese's chunks and brownie bites.
What’s your favorite political movie or TV show?
“The West Wing.”
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Check out the new Gen Z TikTok trends.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I am a triple Cancer zodiac sign and sometimes it shows, and I don’t like that.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.