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.”

Sudden-Lettuce2317 Report

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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.

77kloklo77 Report

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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.

Rayshon1042 , wikipedia.org Report

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Rose McGowan was completely ostracized and blacklisted for talking about Weinstein too early.

sagieday , wikipedia.org Report

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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"

Luke Keil , wikipedia.org Report

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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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Lisa Bonet. She was vilified for hating Cosby in the 80s. Who’s the villain now?

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Corey Feldman talking about child sex abuse in Hollywood.

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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.

HayakuEon , Faran Raufi Report

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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.

Firethorn101 , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

Few-Frosting-1398 , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

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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.

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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.

JustAbel , Yuri Levchenko Report

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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.

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Craig Ferguson having empathy for Britney Spears in his 2007 monologue.

carissadraws , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

CategoryTurbulent114 , Towfiqu barbhuiya Report

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Anyone who covered their webcam camera.

ironwolf6464 , Emiliano Cicero Report

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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.

ChaoticForkingGood , wikipedia.org Report

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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

DelMarion67 , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

Wintermute , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

FluffyUnicorn949 , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

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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."

going_dot_global , wikipedia.org Report

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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.

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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.

thedarklord187 , ROBIN WORRALL Report

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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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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.

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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.

softredina , Isaac Quesada Report

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