In one of her television appearances, journalist and media manager Margarita Simonyan cited an aggressive quote allegedly from the 28th President of the United States. We checked to see if Wilson said these words.

December 1, 2021 guest of the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” program, editor-in-chief of the RT channel Margarita Simonyan stated: “Thomas Jefferson, a pale young man with a burning gaze, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, with which, in fact, America began as a state, as a nation, wonderful words... In addition to the Declaration of Independence, he also said these lesser-known words: “If there is one trait that is in the blood and flesh of every American, it is that we will never be conquerors.” Since Thomas Jefferson said this, America has fought hundreds of wars of conquest and wars in different parts of the world. And not much time after Thomas Jefferson, another American president, Woodrow Wilson, said the opposite. He said: “If powers have closed their doors to us, we will break down those doors. If our financiers have received privileges in some country, the state must use all its military power to defend these privileges, even if this means violating the sovereignty of these powers.” Which, in fact, is what America has been doing ever since.”

Simonyan's words were distributed by such resources as "Tsargrad", "Politics Today", iReactor, "Russians online" and a number of other sites.

The first thing that may catch your eye when checking the authenticity of Wilson’s words is the complete absence of the quote in Russian-language online sources until December 2021, at least in Simonyan’s wording or close to it. However, there is a publication in which you can actually read something similar, and which the editor-in-chief of RT has almost certainly read. We are talking about the bestseller by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick "The Untold History of the USA", which was released in 2012 as a companion piece to the documentary of the same name mini-series. In the introduction to the book you can find the above Jefferson's words, And quote from Major General Smedley Butler: “War is simply a racket,” which Simonyan will mention further. But at the beginning of the first chapter it says: “In 1907, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, declared: “The doors of powers, now locked, must be broken down... The privileges acquired by financiers must be protected by the representatives of [our] state, even if this violates the sovereignty of those countries that are not inclined to meet us halfway.”

In general, a similar quote is present in the original publication (more precisely, in one of the publications). But here is a translation of its more complete version, which can be meet in many works of political science: “Since trade ignores national boundaries, and the manufacturer insists that the whole world is a market, the flag of his country must follow him and the doors of nations that are closed to him must be knocked down... Concessions obtained by financiers must be protected by ministers of state, even if this violates the sovereignty of countries that do not want it. Colonies must be acquired or founded so that no useful corner of the world is overlooked or left unused.”

As we can see, Wilson nevertheless outlined something similar, but there are two more or less significant points.

1. At the time of the utterance of the phrase in 1907, Thomas Woodrow Wilson was not the President of the United States or even a politician, but a scientist and part-time rector of Princeton University, who read lecture at Columbia University. Thus, this thought could not be presented as the point of view of the head of the state. Therefore, the translation “we will break down these doors” is incorrect - the original says “the doors must be knocked down,” and this is advice to one’s own authorities, and not a threat to others.

A similar inaccuracy was made with the quote from Thomas Jefferson, who used the words cited by Simonyan in his personal letter, and not a public statement, and he did this in 1791, also not yet being president of the United States. In addition, he did not write “we will never be conquerors,” but “we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

2. Wilson did not say: “The state must use all its military power to defend these privileges,” he only mentioned the actions of government ministers. And although a little further he speaks about economic confrontation as the “seed of war”, the quote we are considering does not become any less distorted.

Thus, the quotation from Thomas Woodrow Wilson was supplemented with words about the use of military power, which are not even in the Russian translation of the book by Stone and Kuznik. Another problem is that neither Wilson nor Jefferson were heads of state at the time the statements appeared.