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.
This post may include affiliate links.
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.”
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.
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.
Rose McGowan was completely ostracized and blacklisted for talking about Weinstein too early.
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"
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.
Lisa Bonet. She was vilified for hating Cosby in the 80s. Who’s the villain now?
He didnt like when she was naked in a movie. He had her character denise leave diffrent world because she was pregnabt in real life
Corey Feldman talking about child sex abuse in Hollywood.
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.
Yup, my mum read his book Pure, White and Deadly many years ago. People thought he was a conspiracy nut, because *surely* fat in food leads to fat in arteries. Tell that to the people who live in the Arctic Circle and traditionally eat large amounts of seal blubber. To be honest though, I hate this crusade against sugar we're now having. In the UK everything is packed with artificial sweeteners. I'd rather have real sugar, in small quantities as a treat than eat sweeteners regularly. There's emerging evidence that they do damage to your gut microbiome.
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.
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.
The fact anyone voted twice for the administration that implemented trickle-down economics still shocks me, and I was alive for both times Reagan was voted in... And old enough to cry both times, too.
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.
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.
He was POTUS 1876-81, after a very nasty election (think: the 2016 of its day). The qoute can be found in "The Diary & Letters" of same, published in the edition I've seen in 1920-something.
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.
Aww, the good old times where the church had much more power and religious beliefs were more common than nowadays.
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.
Dude was fascinating in that he had advanced views on a lot of different subjects - how memory works, multiverse theory, other planets & alien life, etc. But it wasn't his views on space/stars that got him in trouble with The Church, though they did contribute. He was a friar and was teaching reincarnation, that Jesus was a lying liar about the Trinity, that other planets had life independent of Christianity, and that people shouldn't be afraid of heaven or hell. He was also hugely arrogant and gruff, which doesn't go over well with authority figures.
Strange that a so called Christian church has murdered so many that didn't think like them. The Bible says thou shall not kill.
Thou shall not suffer a witch to live. One of many place in Exodus, and Old Testament where killing was the prescribed method of elimination.
Load More Replies...
From what I read and have experienced, Giordano had an out of body experience that prompted his revelations and insights. Catholics murdered him for making them feel uncomfortable.
They also forced Galileo to "recant" about is theories about the universe under threat of death. It took the church 600 years to "rehabilitate" him and admit they were wrong. Same thing with genetics and evolution. There are fundamentalists who still teach that the earth is mere 6000 years old and that genetics and evolution are not true. Totally anti-science.
Load More Replies...
I once saw an interview with Ricky Gervais asking why he had "faith" in science and not god. His answer came down to something like if you took all the science books and all the religious texts and destroyed all of them in 1000 years the information from the science books will be the same as it is now and the religious texts won't.
another person probably labeled crazy is the young man obsessed with Bruno and "disappeared" leaving his room as basically a cryptic puzzle... It was pretty much PR for his book, but still interesting. https://nypost.com/2017/04/05/student-obsessed-with-aliens-vanishes-leaving-behind-books-written-in-code/
Another story involving science and that oh, so wonderful Catholic church.
The Catholic Church would do something that horrible?? Why, I'm shocked!! Please bring me a glass of non-blood wine.
So many of the great minds stayed silent about their beliefs so that they could complete their analysis and have their beliefs survive them.
Let us kneel to the wisdom and creepiness of the every wrong Catholic church.
Imagine, condemned and burned for Giving the Creator credit for an even MORE wondrous creation.
This one is completely false. Bruno wasn't even close to being the first to share this idea, see for example BISSHOP Nicolas of Cussa in 1500, who discussed this same idea, in the church, without as much as a piece of kindling getting involved, by the late 16th century, heliocentrism and infinite universe were both very popular topics for scholarly debate. Bruno was burned for preaching heretical views on the holy trinity, the nature of the soul and judgment day. Maybe if you're such a bored panda, learn to do some fact checking.
Modern astronomers do not believe that the universe is infinite. See "Hubble limit".
and this is why I follow faith not religion. Very 1st chapter of the bible states there was infinite space before creation. Men and their power trips playing G-d
Shove your stupid imbecile beliefs up your a*s, ignorant cuint.
Load More Replies...
No, Bruno was a lunatic. A stark-raving mad, anti-reason, anti-science whackadoodle nut job. Yes, he was correct about what planets and stars were. (So were others at the time.) But he had a billion other completely ideas so silly that the History Channel would laugh at him. He was denied protection by the Church because of his heresy, but he was burned at the stake by secular authorities on the charge of sedition.
Your view demonstrates what this thread is really about.... not so much the specific people mentioned, but assumptions that someone's ideas are wrong and bad simply because they are contrary to popular beliefs.
Load More Replies... 
Craig Ferguson having empathy for Britney Spears in his 2007 monologue.
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.
At least former Halliburton CEO, Cheney, got his company no-bid contracts to help rebuild Iraq.
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.
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
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.
This should be more commonly known. I didn't learn about the roots of the rejection of evolution until I was in a college level anthropology course. I always assumed it was a religious objection. Just proves that religion isn't qualified to know what it's upset about.
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.
Galileo knew to tread lightly. His colleague, Giordano Bruno, was executed via burning at the stake for believing in heliocentricity.
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.
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."
And no one talks about Eisenhower's 99% taxation plan on businesses unless they increased wages, offered more benefits, gave payed time off, etc.
Carrie Nation of the Temperance/Prohibition movement
She 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.
Anyone who publicly tries to uplift the vulnerable will be made a mockery by the powerful; it's not within their agenda to share power.
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.
I'm likely in a minority but I really don't give any f***s if people want to waste time listening into my daily life/phone/emails etc - all they're going to get is me talking c**p with mates, my husband and my kids, meme wars that go on for months at a time, the insane number of cake decorating videos I watch and my true crime obsession. I don't see some government employed person bored oot their tits seeing the drivel people talk as an invasion of privacy - and if snooping on folks interactions prevents some big disaster like the twin towers then I think it's worth it. And I kinda like the fact I'll mention wanting a new mattress and then getting every ad directed towards mattresses, it reminds me to look for them when I'd likely otherwise forget as my brain is like Swiss cheese
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.
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.
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.
The explorer was Francisco de Orellana. The YouTube link for the BBC documentary, Unnatural Histories, is https://youtu.be/ihvySe6yROE
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.
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.
The NFL and MLB and every other nationally governed sport (not to mention the Olympics!) don't WANT fans to know about doping. Ruins the cash flow if spectators know that everyone's sloshing in chemicals and that only the richest and sneakiest win.
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.
To Nixon and his allies it sure seemed great: Latin American governments would earn drug money to suppress dissent and revolt, a crisis of drugs on the streets would enable laws targeting minorities and hippies, and the only victims would be people on the margins of US society. Thanks Nixon.
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.
sadly we could fix it/ prevent it a lot longer, and we have all proven we can, yet we also prove we refuse to do it unless it means death, When covid was raging hard, the climate cleared, pollution and smog were gone for a while, the earth was actually better then it had been in years..... but only for a few days/weeks, because the second we could go back to our old ways...... we did and f**ked it up again
Mitt Romney and his comment about Russia. I voted against him, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right about Russia.
Just a taking a moment for perspective here- How crazy is it that the US has fallen so far that Mitt Romney looks like the rational Republican? If you let that soak in, I think you'll see just how bad things are right now.
"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.
John Brown's revolt is believed to have split the parties on the slavery issue, and contributed to election of Lincoln. He was calling his own shots, in a loose sense.
Actress Jean Seeberg wasn’t paranoid. The FBI [were out to get her]
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.
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.
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.
Harry Markopolos outed Bernie Madoff for almost a decade before the whole scam imploded.
What did Harry do after that? Bernie's wife ensconced herself in her Florida home with all that stolen cash.
Every conspiracy theorist that believed in MKUltra before US released it was all real.
MKUltra - Stargate Project - Project Sunstreak - Operation Grill Flame.... All super interesting
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)
When the first reports of casualties came to Allied generals during the first battles, those generals did not believe the large numbers of dead and dying. They sent more and more troops in, believing that all their study of Napoleonic tactics worked with men using machine guns. Afterwards, they dug in, and you could walk from the English Channel to Switzerland in those trenches without coming above ground.
General Patton , we should of kept heading to Russia after WW2.
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.
I'm surprised Johnny Rotten isn't on the list. Banned by the BBC in 1978 for calling out Jimmy Saville as a predator.
Yeah, there's even an audio recording of him calling Jimmy out (https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/watch-johnny-rotten-call-out-jimmy-savile-decades-before-netflix.html), but the BBC refused to air it back then. I couldn't stand the man (Johnny) when he was with the Pistols and he's still a bit of the old "mad lad", but his recent interviews and comments have been spot-on.
Load More Replies...
Thor Heyerdahl. That guy said that it is completely possible to build a raft in South America (I think it was in Peru) and use it to sail to Philiphines. Many experts didn't believe him, so he made a party of six or seven guys, built the raft and made the journey.
Many more scientists. On top of my head, Barbara McClintock, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweis (especially Ignaz Semmelweis), Frances Oldham Kelsey and likely many more. Some of them were proven right in their lifetime and received high honors, some of them didn't live to see fruits of their labour.
Semmelweis! I was trying to remember his name. Yes, he should have been up there.
Load More Replies...
I'm waiting for the time that John Anthony West is validated about his findings on the age of the Pyramids and The Sphinx.- 14,000 years. Of course people called him crazy, but his research is based on Geology, not Archeology. As I see it, and my Geology prof agreed, Geology is an exact science. Archeology is interpretive, and at times, makes things either "fit", or disappear. Interesting dilemma.
Just because you're right doesn't mean you aren't crazy. And some of these people may not have been crazy, but neither were they right.
Came here to say the similar, a handful of these people were considered crazy anyway, and were just considered more crazy or the crazy label was (very very wrongly) weaponised against them, as a result of their beliefs or statements, despite them being correct. Sadly all too common in Hollywood especially, and far too effective against women.
Load More Replies...
It's sad how many of these people were negatively affected by religion and religious views of others. And it's still happening. It's like we never learn to stop allowing religion to dictate our government or people's lives just in general.
Please change keto-acidosis to ketosis. They are NOT the same thing. Keto-acidosis is life threatening.
Alfred Wegener was thought to be crazy when he presented his theory on continental drift
Denying continental drift always blew my mind. What, did europe and north america both independently evolve foxes and bears from the first single-celled organisms? Clearly the continents were joined for most of earth's history. I remember clearly as a 5 year old in kindergarten looking at a globe of earth and saying "hey I see south america fits against africa". It's so obvious it's painful.
Load More Replies...
Actually, yes. The original Salk vaccine needed boosters, and so did the smallpox vaccine.
Load More Replies...
I'm surprised Johnny Rotten isn't on the list. Banned by the BBC in 1978 for calling out Jimmy Saville as a predator.
Yeah, there's even an audio recording of him calling Jimmy out (https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/watch-johnny-rotten-call-out-jimmy-savile-decades-before-netflix.html), but the BBC refused to air it back then. I couldn't stand the man (Johnny) when he was with the Pistols and he's still a bit of the old "mad lad", but his recent interviews and comments have been spot-on.
Load More Replies... Thor Heyerdahl. That guy said that it is completely possible to build a raft in South America (I think it was in Peru) and use it to sail to Philiphines. Many experts didn't believe him, so he made a party of six or seven guys, built the raft and made the journey.
Many more scientists. On top of my head, Barbara McClintock, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweis (especially Ignaz Semmelweis), Frances Oldham Kelsey and likely many more. Some of them were proven right in their lifetime and received high honors, some of them didn't live to see fruits of their labour.
Semmelweis! I was trying to remember his name. Yes, he should have been up there.
Load More Replies... I'm waiting for the time that John Anthony West is validated about his findings on the age of the Pyramids and The Sphinx.- 14,000 years. Of course people called him crazy, but his research is based on Geology, not Archeology. As I see it, and my Geology prof agreed, Geology is an exact science. Archeology is interpretive, and at times, makes things either "fit", or disappear. Interesting dilemma.
Just because you're right doesn't mean you aren't crazy. And some of these people may not have been crazy, but neither were they right.
Came here to say the similar, a handful of these people were considered crazy anyway, and were just considered more crazy or the crazy label was (very very wrongly) weaponised against them, as a result of their beliefs or statements, despite them being correct. Sadly all too common in Hollywood especially, and far too effective against women.
Load More Replies... It's sad how many of these people were negatively affected by religion and religious views of others. And it's still happening. It's like we never learn to stop allowing religion to dictate our government or people's lives just in general.
Please change keto-acidosis to ketosis. They are NOT the same thing. Keto-acidosis is life threatening.
Alfred Wegener was thought to be crazy when he presented his theory on continental drift
Denying continental drift always blew my mind. What, did europe and north america both independently evolve foxes and bears from the first single-celled organisms? Clearly the continents were joined for most of earth's history. I remember clearly as a 5 year old in kindergarten looking at a globe of earth and saying "hey I see south america fits against africa". It's so obvious it's painful.
Load More Replies... Actually, yes. The original Salk vaccine needed boosters, and so did the smallpox vaccine.
Load More Replies...