45 People Who Were Right All Along But No One Believed Them

Charles Darwin. There’s a whole book on how scared he was to publish his work because he knew he’d be hated for it. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen.

John Yudkin was a food scientist who tried hard to push the idea that sugar caused heart disease and obesity amongst other conditions. He suggested a low carb diet for weight loss in 1958. The sugar industry paid scientists like Ansel Keys and D. Mark Hegsted to downplay this connection and suggest that dietary fat caused obesity and heart disease. Massive lobbying helped pro sugar scientists to become advisors to government and officially suggest a low fat diet to prevent heart disease. Taking fat out of food makes it taste bad, so what do they add? More sugar, causing the food to be unhealthier. The demonising of fat lasted well into the 2000's and often still persists to this day.

George Carlin. People used to think he was a hippy spouting off idealistic governmental propaganda. The man was a prophet.

Richard Jewell was blasted as being the Atlanta Olympic Bomber when he was really just a guy helping people out down there.

He deserved better.

Nicolaus Copernicus, theorized that the planets actually circled the sun instead of the other way around. The church initially accepted heliocentricacy but banned his views in 1600s.

Corey Feldman exposing all the pedos in Hollywood.

I would say the UN Chief Inspector, Hans Blix, who said in a 2003 report that the UN investigation team had found no evidence of WMD in Iraq. Completely torn apart by the American government, public, and press. And yet… no WMD were ever found in Iraq.

Joseph Lister. One of the first doctors to publicly endorse germ theory and recommend disinfection. At the time surgeons would literally move from an amputation, to an autopsy, to the delivery room using the same tools often without even cleaning the gore from their hands and clothes. When Lister recommended comprehensive disinfection between procedures nearly the whole British medical community laughed at him. He spent years as a pariah gathering data from his own practice until he could finally prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his methods reduced post-op infection by a staggering rate. Now he's known as "The father of modern surgery."

Stanley Prusiner. Everyone who was anyone in science knew that proteins couldn't be an infectious agent. They weren't even alive! He suffered so much mockery and scepticism... until the mad cow disease, and kuru etc, were found to be precisely what he had described.

The journalists who maintained Lance Armstrong was doping when he was winning the Tour de France. I remember they were mocked because they admittedly went to extremes hunting for evidence. I remember reports of them sifting through Armstrong's trash.

Lance Armstrong was a great story, a testicular cancer survivor who beat the disease and went on to set the record for most Tour de France victories (was it 7?). He was untouchable. Anyone contesting he was cheating was shamed. I remember the journalists investigating him were mostly French, so they were dismissed because they were sour that an American was breaking the Tour de France records. I remember other Tour winners such as Greg Le Mond and Floyd Landis also contesting that Armstrong was cheating, and both being silenced/shamed. Landis had tested positive himself for doping so he wasn't considered a reliable source. I remember with Le Mond they dug into his history and brought up child abuse he suffered as a result of him making claims against Armstrong.

Turns out they were all right.

Hippies in the 70’s and black people at the time aswell were HUGE victims of the war on drugs and most of the drugs were proven to be vilified just so Nixon could arrest X people for any plant he wanted.

And let’s not forget heroin and other destructive and addictive drugs were funneled into minority areas via the GOV.

An actual quote from “John Ehrlichman” where he essentially “confessed”

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

Anita Hill. I called my father as I was upset no one believed her. I knew what I was experiencing in the work place. She is my hero. Because of her the corporate company I worked for started promoting women into management roles. In my career as I am now retired, I was the first woman manager in four different locations, all different corporations. I didn't have a degree but had talent in my field. I attended a state conference where other managers in my field attended. I was the only women and didn't realize it til the next year's conference when another women entered the room. I was in that room because of my talent and until someone opened that door I couldn't go in. Anita unlocked that door.

Remember when people thought Marie Curie's work was 'too dangerous'? Now we can't imagine medicine and technology without her discoveries.

Martha Mitchell, after whom the Martha Mitchell Effect is named. Watergate whistleblower. She was the wife of the US AG at the time, John Mitchell. Despite being known privately to suffer from a fair bit of social anxiety, she was nevertheless outspoken and was seen as a little eccentric. This ended up being used against her by, among other people, her own husband (who at one point had her *kidnapped* in the middle of a phone call to a reporter over this), to thoroughly publicly discredit, mock, and belittle her when she blew the whistle on Watergate - though she initially believed her husband was an innocent fall guy. Nixon actually *blamed her* for Watergate, saying she was a distraction to AG Mitchell and that without her, Watergate never even would have happened! Which is just wild. Aside from her son, her family abandoned her until full details of Watergate became more widely publicly known and one of the people involved in the kidnapping admitted it had happened. The Martha Michell Effect is when a patient's true, but extreme claims are either incorrectly or maliciously dismissed as delusions by a medical (especially psychiatric) professional..

Dr. John Leal, the first man to chlorinate drinking water to kill germs. Only, chlorine is a deadly poison, so he did so secretly for a couple months at first. The judge was incredulous that a man would poison the water supply from which his own son drank, but Leal said that it was the safest water in the world, and he was right. Suitably diluted, the chlorine does no notable damage to humans worlds of hurt to bacteria.

Mitt Romney during his presidential run said Putin was the biggest threat.

Dr. Joseph Goldberger. He was the doctor that discovered the cause of the Pellagra epidemic that was sweeping the southern USA. He linked it to a bad diet, specifically a corn heavy diet. Cornmeal and grits were a southern staple, and and incredibly cheap way to feed orphans, prisoners, and the poor. Pellagra is caused by a lack of vitamin B3, aka niacin. Normally corn is high in niacin, but that niacin is locked up and unavailable to the human digestive system unless the corn is treated, aka "softened", typically with lye. In the early 1900's, manufactures switched to a different process that eliminated this treatment with lye. Corn was no longer softened. Then people, especially the poor, prisoners and orphans started dying of pellagra. Some orphanages and prisons had a death rate of over 40%. Tens of thousands were dying annually. Through a series of experiments, Goldberger proved that it was a corn-heavy diet that caused pellagra. He cured it in 2 institutions just by adding vegetables to their diet. He also caused it in a 14 prisoner "volunteers". But, and this is the important part: He was Jewish, and he was trying to tell Southerners they they were doing something wrong. So he was ridiculed and ignored. And pellagra continued to kill tens of thousands in the USA, and sicken tens of thousands more, for decades. When Goldberger died in 1929 pellagra continued to kill tens of thousands annually, 15 years after he had found the cure. It would continue to kill thousands for another couple of decades until someone more acceptable, Conrad Elvehjem, confirmed Goldberger's work in the late 1930's. All because southerners didn't want a Jew telling then that they were doing something wrong. He was insulting their southern heritage, by god! PS: "Insulting their southern heritage" is not my words. It's the words of the southern politicians who pulled his funding and campaigned for his removal from the US Public Health Service.

One of the lesser known ones is Hellen Keller. Her story of overcoming her disabilities as a young woman was often taught to children, but her adult life was largely excluded because of her "radical" ideas at the time which involved pushing for black rights, anti-lynching laws, early support of birth control, supporting liberal socialism, and she even co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union.

Nan Briton had an affair with US president Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, and Briton tried to sue for child support. She was ridiculed in court. In 2015, Ancestry.com did a DNA analysis on Harding's and Briton's descendants. Nan was telling the truth.

Edward Snowden was infamously branded a traitor by the US Government for leaking things like Prism, after the american people had long suspected the government had been spying on them for years since the days of Patriot Act.

He was just simply the confirmation of all of our suspicions.