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Pete Buttigieg: “Newsweek said we were one of America's 10 dying cities.”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation"

Published January 28, 2026 | Video Starts at 19:36

When I took office, our per capita income, I think, was 17,000 or $18,000 per person. This isn't that long ago. It was 2011. Unemployment was double digits. Newsweek said we were one of America's 10 dying cities. and people refused to accept that. They stepped up. I think it's an incredible story, and I got to tell you, having run for president, having served in the cabinet, … (19:36–19:40)

CLAIM

Asserts that Newsweek labeled South Bend as one of America's 10 dying cities.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

“The data centers are $10 billion projects.”
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“At the time that the Security Council was set up, something like 90% of people in China were rural peasants.”
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“Today, people living in China, for the most part, enjoy superior technology in transportation and certain other sectors to people living in…”
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“South Bend was a billion dollar mandate from the EPA to change the way that the sewer system emptied into the river.”
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“The interconnection between the life of the university and the city has become extraordinary.”
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“The world [children are] coming into will obviously be so radically transformed.”
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“We seem to have less access to the truth now than we did 20 years ago.”
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“The most important questions about how AI will unfold...are fundamentally policy questions.”
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“We have decisions to make, whether it's public policy about the economy and who gets to benefit from the enormous wealth that is being…”
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“Educational institutions will of course have to develop policies that will support the building of tools that we need to do on our own.”
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“There's no more reason to expect automatically that [AI] will make us worse at thinking than it is to assume that the advent of the…”
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“We've had the benefit of about a 100 year period in which any question of fact could mostly be settled...if somebody...could produce a…”
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“That's no longer available to us, or it's in the process of, we're in the process of losing it.”
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“Few places are more vulnerable to it [AI], but I think also a few places have more value that they might be able to unlock from it than…”
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“The GM facility alone, that's three or $4 billion.”
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“I met with electrical worker apprentices in classes with more than 200 people at a time.”
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“It used to be maybe a dozen union electrical workers in an apprentice class, if you were lucky.”
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“We invested in this community both in ways that were very much associated with the administration, like EVs and newer clean tech industry.”
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“That was ARPA dollars.”
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“When I took office, our per capita income, I think, was 17,000 or $18,000 per person.”
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“Unemployment was double digits.”
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“Universities are under attack not because they are liberal, but because they are independent.”
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“The moment that we become the kind of country where your ability to get a job or your eligibility to get cancer research funding or your…”
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“The example set by the Republican members of the State assembly is so powerful and important because they were pushed to do something that…”
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“What every firm, every university and every politician has discovered if they tried to play the game of this administration in order to…”
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“The rules-based international order has always been one in which the rules were bent.”
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“We have some institutions that are designed to be robust enough that they last for centuries, like the US Constitution.”
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“Most of the biggest changes, transformations, upheavals in human history were driven by young people.”
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“If you want to testify in Congress, you have to be invited or subpoenaed.”
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“If you want to speak in front of the elected officials making decisions in the South Bend Common Council, you show up on a Monday night.”
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“When I see a five year old child used as bait in Texas in an immigration race, trade to get a hold of his parents who, from what I…”
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“An American citizen is being dragged out on a cold Minnesota day in his underwear by troops.”
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“Political Instagram or TikTok or whatever it's going to be, which by the way, has overtaken actual media journalism, is how a lot of people…”
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“By doing [this], it could save hundreds of millions of dollars, which meant thousands of dollars per family in their water rates in a low…”
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“We faced this here during the first Trump administration before it ever came to the level that we're dealing with right now.”
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“Companies that were showing me their leadership two years ago in electric vehicles... building battery factories in Glendale, Kentucky and…”
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“Now two years later, they're backtracking, some of them writing off billions of dollars of value that was effectively just wiped out by the…”
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“Our administration... believed not only that there was an environmental benefit to electric vehicles, but that there was a strategic benefit…”
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“China make these huge investments in EVs... because they understand the strategic value of conquering the future of the auto industry.”
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“If you're an automaker, you intend to do your product planning on about a four year cycle.”
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“We're supposed to be a country that has less vulnerability to policy whiplash than other systems.”
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“The filibuster... should be done away with.”
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“Government in general at the federal level has become so unresponsive to people, to what people actually think, that you get these lurches.”
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“The way we elect members of Congress is not set in the Constitution.”
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“The electoral college is a problem.”
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“I think a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics is appropriate.”
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“Most Americans want [a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics].”
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