- 1st president to use the FBI to arrest people who did not agree with his foreign policy on going to war.
- He was the primary driving force of the Treaty of Versailles which bankrupted Germany which led to the rise of Hitler and WW2
- He literally caused WW2, Communism, created the income tax and gave women voting rights.
- He’s the one that decided America needs to be imperial vs colonial power (Guam, Virgin Islands, etc.). There were no American colonies after Woodrow Wilson.
- He started the Progressive Era that we’re currently still in. Fascism probably comes next.
The Espionage Act of 1917 that gave the government the power to spy on you and get away with it.
2024 Update
- The Administrative State was started by Woodrow Wilson and exacerbated by FDR. He enabled government agencies to start passing rules that allowed them to prosecute people and send them to jail. The Supreme Court basically made all of that null and void by ruling in the Chevron Case that all of that nonsense is unconstitutional. Now when the IRS says you owe us money and if you don’t pay you’re going to prison, that may not be constitutional.
- What the Chevron Case decided was that if Congress passes a law that is vague then the agency charged with implementing that law can declare best practices and therefore set a rule that has the weight of legislative law.
- Congress doesn’t want to legislate and thus they allowed the administrative state to do it for them. No one wants to be the bad guy and risk not getting reelected, so they allowed the government agencies to pass “rules” and enforce them, even though they aren’t laws and are unconstitutional.