People say a lot of stupid stuff. And we judge them for it. But every now and then, over time, enough evidence emerges to prove us all wrong and redeem even the wildest statements.
Interested in these cases, Redditor TheCheeryStranger recently asked other platform users, "What 'crazy' person in history was right the whole time?" and everyone immediately started sending in their answers.
From Ernest Hemingway talking about the FBI tailing him to Galileo Galilei being trialed by the Church for his heretic claim that the Earth revolves around the sun, here are some of the most interesting ones.
#1
Hemingway talked about the FBI following him prior to his suicide. They thought he was paranoid. Decades later some papers get released, turns out the FBI was following him.
Image credits: ArchieBellTitanUp
#2
Sinead O’Connor - she was vilified for ripping up a photo of the pope to protest child abuse within the Catholic Church. Spoiler alert - the Catholic Church was covering up child abuse.
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#3
There was a wacko looking guy on Oprah who stopped his vanilla presentation to tell the audience that plastic causes cancer, stop using it to store food and water.Oprah cut to commercial and whisked him off the show.
Dude was right. BPAs were outed that day, but it took another decade for that info to become public knowledge.
Image credits: Firethorn101
#4
Charles Darwin. The religious outcry against evolution was engineered by his academic rivals more than from religious resistance. But even now, after all that politics is centuries dead, there remain people who categorically resist demonstrable fact because of it.
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#5
John Yudkin. The single scientist who didn't believe the sugar industry's research that demonized fats. Till his death he's adamant that fats weren't the cause of obesity and heart attacks.
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#6
Tesla. Edison is still credited with the lightbulb. His last words put it into perspective "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation"
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#7
The inventor of dialysis, Dr. Willem Kolff. Although it's hard to blame them, haha. He saw people dying of kidney disease and said "Hey, what if we take all of the blood out of your body, clean it, and put it back in?" (Cleaning your blood is the job of your kidneys, and a dialysis machine is basically an artificial kidney, on the *outside* of your body.) It was a wild idea and he started his work during WWII and had to work with basic materials like orange juice cans, sausage skins, and a washing machine. Many of the first patients died, but they were already going to die painfully. Eventually, he ironed the kinks out and started saving lives.
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#8
Stanislav Petrov. Though we don't see him as crazy, I'm sure his crewmates thought he was. He directly disobeyed Soviet military protocols and prevented a nuclear war.
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#9
Rose McGowan was completely ostracized and blacklisted for talking about Weinstein too early.
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#10
Margaret Dunbar. Her four year old son went missing and one day the cops found him and brought him home. Except it wasn’t her son and everyone tried to gaslight her into believing it was. Well she was right and no one knows what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar to this day.
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#11
Galileo - he believed the Earth and other planets orbited the Sun, contrary to popular belief that all stars and planets orbited Earth. The Catholic Church called it heresy, and ordered him to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin a trial for his beliefs.
Image credits: FluffyUnicorn949
#12
Heinrich Schliemann. He 100% believed that ancient Troy had really existed. So he armed himself with a copy of the Iliad, and actually managed to find and excavate the city. He'd told everyone and their sister that Troy was a real place for 40 years before he found it, and everyone thought he was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Not so much, it turns out.
Image credits: ChaoticForkingGood
#13
During the plague in Moscow there was a priest (or something) DIScouraging people kissing the statue of Maria, as to stop the spreading of the virus.The poor man was burned alive for blasphemy.
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#14
Lisa Bonet. She was vilified for hating Cosby in the 80s. Who’s the villain now?
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#15
Boltzman spend his life trying to prove his formula but ended up commiting suicide because none of his collegues believed him. Now, his formula is basically the 'amen' in thermodynamics.
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#16
Giordano Bruno was (probably) the first European who proposed the possibility that not only was the universe infinite, but stars were not just points of light in the sky; they could be suns with their own planets, and that some of those planets might even host life.The Catholic Church had him tried for Heresy and had him burned at the stake and his contemporaries though he was completely insane. He had some kooky ideas, but he was absolutely right about the size of the universe and stars being suns with their own planets.
Image credits: Randomcommenter550
#17
Dr. Atkins.When his first book 'The New Diet Revolution' came out, he was mocked and ridiculed for thinking that refined sugars, flour, and starch caused the glycemic index to skyrocket which led to your body storing fat. When he died people thought he died from his own diet.
Keto-acidosis and how you can lose weight by reducing your glycemic index was largely his research.
It was later stolen and copied and called 'The Zone Diet' and 'The Caveman Diet' and 'The Paleo Diet' which were all based on his work.
Image credits: tommygunz007
#18
Remember the government accountant in George W Bush’s presidency who said the war in Afghanistan would cost a billion dollars a month and he was fired? Well, he was right. It was 300 million dollars per day for 20 years.
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#19
Clair Patterson-he was made out to be crazy by giant oil companies bc he tested ice cores in the Arctic and figured out that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, the water, and our bodies was extremely high and caused by leaded gasoline. He petitioned Congress for years to make it illegal to add lead to gasoline, but the corporations kept getting him shut down because they used lead as an anti-knock agent for internal combustion engines. Ironically, lead was causing everyone else to go crazy because it is shaped like a neurotransmitter and blocks receptors causing insanity, similarly to what mercury does, and many employees of the oil companies had gone mad. After decades of battling the oil companies, he finally got his way and lead was removed from gasoline. Since then, the amount of lead in the atmosphere and I’m living things has decreased dramatically. Clair Patterson… a f**king hero.He also created the first truly “clean room.”
Image credits: Sudden-Lettuce2317
#20
Craig Ferguson having empathy for Britney Spears in his 2007 monologue.
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#21
Anyone who covered their webcam camera.
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#22
I don't know that guy's name but he basically from 1541-1542 travelled accross south america. The first european to do so. While he was on his journey he said he saw millions of people and large cities , with a lot of life in them , where today is the amazon rainforest.After he had finished his journey he had told the stories of those cities and about a hundred years later when explorers visited the place there was nothing , no cities , no people , just jungle. So they thought he had made all that up. But modern technology has shown that there might have accually been a lot of cities there , and that those people died out with smallpox and all cities were covered by the jungle within the course of 50 years. So basically people thought he was crazy and made everything up but in modern times its proven that he was right all along.
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#23
Lord Kitchener (Horacio Herbert Kitchener) Secretary State of War for the British Army. At the onset of WW1, everyone thought the war would end very quickly, either going one way or the other. Kitchener was one of the few people to envision a long war, and to prepare accordingly, even though the British government actively hampered many of his efforts (even though he was a war hero)
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#24
Morgan Robertson.In 1898 he published a story about a ship named the Titan, a fictional ship, that sinks after hitting an iceberg. Allegedly (and I can’t find any proof of this) it was initially dismissed for being too outlandish.
14 years later, the Titanic sinks in an eerily similar fashion. Robertson dismissed all claims of being psychic, and was just familiar with ships of the time and their flaws.
#25
Mitt Romney and his comment about Russia. I voted against him, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right about Russia.
Image credits: Damn_Dog_Inappropes
#26
Harry Markopolos outed Bernie Madoff for almost a decade before the whole scam imploded.#27
Will Rogers a humorist when he invented the term "trickle-down" economics as a joke stating that this type of economy would just make the rich richer and the poor poorer.And then we actually implemented it and used the term trickle-down. And Will Rogers was right.
The rent has gone though the roof and our salaries have stagnated and we can't afford "The American Dream" anymore.
Image credits: Few-Frosting-1398
#28
Eisenhower. Re: The military–industrial complex"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Image credits: going_dot_global
#29
Corey Feldman talking about child sex abuse in Hollywood.#30
All the people that said the NSA/CIA was spying on us for years.Thanks to edward Snowden we now know that was true and it was so much so that the NSA had built back doors in pretty much every single electronic device that exsists all the way down to the network switch level on cisco switches and the internet backbone through AT&T network hubs. The fact that there wasnt mass revolt after that information was released kinda blew my mind.
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#31
Martha Mitchell.. She was like part of the reason why it was discovered that Nixon was involved in Watergate. Her husband was part of the Nixon group so she got some inside details. When she wanted to tell the news about the whole scandal, her husband and Nixon men put her in a hotel and restrained her from having any contact with anyone. She was seen as an insane person her husband and Nixon's men even managed to convince the psychiatrists that she was out of her mind.Actually there's a phenomenon in psychology which was named after her a.k.a the Martha Mitchell Effect
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#32
MrBeast infiltrated the YouTube market early. Mastered it. Making millions on millions a decade later at age 23. He bet on new media, looked crazy for a while but in the end won big.I understand to most he’s not a historical figure but as a marketing and digital media expert—he’s a pioneer in my book. He wrote the playbook. Plus there’s a typo in the question haha.
Image credits: Bkafrogurl
#33
Henry A Wallace was Roosevelt's running mate and vice president in his 3rd term in office but was dropped from the ticket in the 4th in favor of Truman. Wallace was correct on a lot of issues manifesting in America that are still here today, race, education, and what happens to society unfer unregulated capitalism.In many ways Wallace's story mirrors the story of every single progressive the democratic party has tried to run in the 20th century. Rhetoric is fine but don't go after corporate greed.
Truman and Wallace could not have been more different. If Wallace had stayed as running mate and vp at the time of FDR's death, its possible to imagine we would be living in a totally different world.
Image credits: Porkbut
#34
Alfred Wegener figured out continental drift in 1912, but nobody would buy it until research in oceanography and geology proved it in the early 1960's.#35
Gregor Mendel, he invented modern day genetics, but people back when he was alive, close to 1890s, thought he was wrong, only to be proven way later on. I found out about this in my 7th grade science class awhile back.#36
After the fall of the Soviet union we started seeing old KGB files. Turns out Joe McCarthy was right. There were in fact soviet infiltrators throughout the government and America writ large.#37
Carrie Nation of the Temperance/Prohibition movementShe has been ridiculed and lambasted by history as a kooky, prudish anti-alcohol crusader. But she was actually a diligent progressive activist working through a proto-social justice lens.
Her beef wasn't with alcohol, but rather with distilleries and suppliers flooding small towns with enormous quantities of cheap, low-quality liquor with the explicit intent of turning emotionally devastated WWI veterans into drunkards for profit. (The knock-on effects of that campaign included rampant domestic violence and poverty.)
Gal was working to uplift the most vulnerable people and is only remembered for making a show of smashing bottles.
#38
Every conspiracy theorist that believed in MKUltra before US released it was all real.#39
Actress Jean Seeberg wasn’t paranoid. The FBI [were out to get her]#40
Gary Webb: Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury called “Dark Alliance.” In his report, Webb wrote that the Reagan CIA was responsible for bringing crack cocaine to the United States in the 1980s. He lost his job, and couldn't find another. I guess being a Pulitzer Award winner does not count for much.#41
Jose Canseco named several MLB players who were doping and talked about how prevalent it was and nobody wanted to believe him because he himself was taking steroid. Quintessential case of you’re an asshole but you’re not wrong.#42
General Patton , we should of kept heading to Russia after WW2.#43
Susan Boyle´s such a great representation of this. In her first audition on BGT, she was mocked and laughed at for her appearance and age, but now she is a successful singer and constantly gives back to the community. I admire how humble and down to earth she is.#44
George Orwell? Yea he wasn't crazy but people laughed at him when he released his book and not even 30 years later the communist turned at least part of his books into reality.#45
Well, in very recent history, Alex Jones.He was right about quite a bit of stuff. Cults, gay frogs, Epstein, high level politicians and rich people doing horrible things, sex trafficking, etc. he was right about most of that stuff. The problem was the Sandy hook thing, association with trump, and some conspiracy stuff that people just decided to completely rule him out as a crazy man, which yes he was wrong on some stuff like anyone else, but the fact that he was right about those big things deserves credit
#46
Al Gore's "inconvenient truth" will someday be looked back on as a prophet shouting into the wind.Climate change 2050 - 2100 is going to cause mass migration, mass migration will cause wars, southern Europe will be swamped with North African's and their religion. Many desert areas that hold a marginal population will become as desolate as the Australian outback.
#47
Rachel Caron found that DDT was weakening the shells of bird eggs and contributing to the decline in the bald eagle population. She faced quite a bit of backlash from publishing her book "Silent Spring" detailing her research on the topic.#48
"I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood."I mean yeah he kind of nailed it. He said this at his hanging, less than 2 years before the outbreak of the American Civil War.
#49
Rutherford B Hayes. Not necessarily viewed as crazy, but largely viewed as a bad or useless president."This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations."
Said that in the late 1800's.
#50
The unabomber Ted Kaczynski. His take on technology is pretty much spot on.from Bored Panda https://bit.ly/3w5O9Xm
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