Total 180s

Total 180s: Throughout history certain scientists, philosophers, politicians, athletes, and celebrities have publicly reversed a core belief or position they once defended passionately, sometimes reshaping their entire legacy in the process.

Anthony Flew: For over 50 years he was one of the world's most influential atheist philosophers, famous for the essay Theology and Falsification. In 2004 he stunned colleagues by announcing he now believed in a deistic God, citing the complexity of DNA as evidence of design.

Whittaker Chambers: He spent years as an underground Soviet courier who believed communism was humanity's future. He later defected, testified against State Department official Alger Hiss, and became one of American conservatism's founding voices.

Bernard Nathanson: He co-founded NARAL and personally oversaw around 75,000 abortions as director of one of the busiest clinics in the country. After watching an ultrasound of a fetus reacting to a suction device, he became a leading pro-life advocate and made the film The Silent Scream.

Norma McCorvey: As Jane Roe, she was the anonymous plaintiff whose case legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade. Working next door to an abortion clinic in the 1990s, she converted to Christianity and spent her later years campaigning to overturn the ruling that bore her name.

Malcolm X: He preached that white people were inherently evil as a minister for the Nation of Islam. After making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 and praying alongside Muslims of every race, he publicly renounced separatism in favor of a universal brotherhood.

Robert McNamara: As Secretary of Defense he was the chief architect of America's military buildup in Vietnam. Decades later, in his memoir In Retrospect, he admitted the war was wrong, terribly wrong, shocking the country he once led into it.

Albert Einstein: A committed pacifist, he nonetheless signed a 1939 letter urging President Roosevelt to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could. After witnessing the destruction it caused, he spent his final years campaigning for nuclear disarmament and a world government.

Alfred Nobel: He built his fortune inventing dynamite and other explosives used in weapons. When a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary and called him the merchant of death, he rewrote his will to fund the Nobel Peace Prize.

J. Robert Oppenheimer: He led the Manhattan Project and delivered the atomic bomb that helped end World War II. Soon after, he publicly opposed building the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, a stance that cost him his government security clearance.

Andrei Sakharov: Known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he helped give the USSR its most fearsome weapon. He later became the country's leading human rights dissident, winning the Nobel Peace Prize while living under internal exile.

Ronald Reagan: He campaigned for Democrats and headed the left leaning Screen Actors Guild, once calling himself a New Deal liberal. He went on to become the Republican Party's most influential conservative president, famously joking that he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left him.

Winston Churchill: He entered Parliament as a Conservative, then crossed the floor to join the Liberal Party in 1904 over free trade. Two decades later he crossed back to the Conservatives, quipping that anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.

John Newton: He captained slave trading ships across the Atlantic for years, treating human trafficking as an ordinary trade. He later became an Anglican minister, wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, and campaigned alongside William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade.

George Wallace: As Alabama's governor he declared segregation now, segregation forever and personally blocked Black students from entering a state university. After a 1972 assassination attempt left him paralyzed, he publicly apologized to civil rights leaders and was reelected years later with strong Black support.

Nelson Mandela: He co-founded the armed wing of the African National Congress and endorsed sabotage against apartheid. After 27 years in prison, he emerged to lead a peaceful transition and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead of pursuing revenge.

Charles Colson: As special counsel to President Nixon, he was known as the administration's ruthless hatchet man during Watergate. Facing prison, he underwent a religious conversion and founded Prison Fellowship, one of the world's largest prison ministries.

Saint Paul: Known as Saul of Tarsus, he hunted down and persecuted early Christians, standing by as one follower was stoned to death. A sudden vision on the road to Damascus turned him into Christianity's most prolific missionary and epistle writer.

Bertrand Russell: He was jailed in 1918 for his absolute pacifist opposition to World War One. Two decades later he concluded that stopping Hitler justified war, then spent his final years leading anti nuclear protests and getting arrested again at age 89.

Blaise Pascal: A brilliant mathematician, he invented an early calculator and laid foundations for probability theory before turning 30. A mystical religious experience on the night of November 23, 1654, led him to largely abandon mathematics for theology and philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: His first book, the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, claimed to have solved every problem in philosophy through a rigid picture theory of language. He later rejected his own earlier work, developing the entirely different approach published as Philosophical Investigations.

Charlton Heston: The actor marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington in support of civil rights. Decades later he became a prominent conservative and served as president of the National Rifle Association, famously daring anyone to take his gun from his cold, dead hands.

Jane Fonda: She traveled to Hanoi in 1972 and was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti aircraft gun, earning the nickname Hanoi Jane. She later called the photo the biggest mistake of her life and spent years working to reconcile with American veterans.

George Foreman: He was heavyweight boxing's most feared and sullen champion, glowering his way through the 1970s. A near death experience in a locker room in 1977 turned him into a born again minister known for warmth and humor, and he later reclaimed the heavyweight title at age 45.

Muhammad Ali: He joined the Nation of Islam, adopted its teachings on racial separatism, and refused induction into the Vietnam War draft on those grounds. By the late 1970s he had left the group for mainstream Sunni Islam and embraced a message of unity across races and religions.