Creator Backlash / Real Life

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Business

• Jimmy Wales, original owner and co-creator of Wikipedia, originally made money on the Internet with a site for what he calls "glamour photography" (read: softcore porn), now downplayed for obvious reasons.
• Henry Ford's outspoken anti-Semitism and coziness to the Third Reich is this to the Ford Motor Company and had a noticeable negative effect on the company's public image in the World War II era. Ford today still struggles with how to balance this with the company's history and Henry's achievements. Though with Henry's great-grandson and current Ford family scion William Clay Ford, Jr being an outspoken progressive liberal and Ford having had a Jewish CEO (Mark Fields, 2014-17), it is a lot easier now for the company to distance itself from this legacy.
  • This trope may also apply to Henry himself near the end of his life. It has been reported that after the end of World War II, he watched newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps and was absolutely horrified at what he saw, especially knowing that he contributed to the ideology that brought about their existence. Some accounts even state that watching said footage is what triggered his fatal stroke in 1947.
• Hotelier Ian Schrager doesn't like talking about his time as co-owner of Studio 54, which was so infamous it landed him and partner Steve Rubell in jail.
  • In fact in the 1998 film '54', a highly fictionalized version of the story of the club, Rubell (played by Mike Myers) is a major character, but Schrager is never seen or mentioned at all.
• With all the inevitable misfires you get in the automobile industry, it's rare that a company would consider one particular model an Old Shame. However, General Motors does have a few that it openly acknowledges.
  • The Cadillac Cimarron is one of the most notorious examples of badge engineering taken way too far. In 1982, GM basically took their compact J-Car line ^note which included the Chevy Cavalier, Buick Skyhawk, Oldsmobile Firenza, and Pontiac Sunbird, as well as the Opel Ascona, Vauxhall Cavalier, Holden Camira, and Isuzu Aska and tried to make a luxury car out of it. The result was an ugly, underpowered mess. While compact luxury sedans like the BMW 3 Series, the Mercedes C-Class, and Cadillac's own ATS are a thing nowadays, the Cimmaron was most certainly not one of those — it was a Cavalier that someone had stuck Cadillac trim on, and it looked and handled like it. While every other Caddy since 1914 sported at least a V-6, and the company hadn't had a model with a clutch since the 1950s, the Cimarron had a 4-cylinder engine with 4-speed manual transmission. They also sold it at nearly double the price of any of the rest of its J-Car siblings — despite looking or driving nothing like a Cadillac. The bad rep Cadillac got from the fiasco nearly sank the entire line. According to legend, Cadillac Product Director John Howell had a picture of the Cimarron on a wall with the caption, "Lest we forget." For comparison: This◊ is an '82 Cimarron. This◊ is an '82 Eldorado 2-door, the next smallest Caddy offered.
    • Cadillac would try this again with the Catera (a rebadged Opel Omega) in the late 90s. It also flopped, mainly to due to the Cadillac brand being sullied by the previous entry and GM as whole having a pretty bad reputation around that time. This wasn't quite the embarrassment the Cimarron was, but they're definitely not sad about no one really remembering it.
  • In 1996, General Motors introduced the EV1 electric car, becoming the first major carmaker to mass produce an electric vehicle in the modern era. However, in 2003 the company controversially recalled and crushed every one sold, with the exception of 40 units which were donated to museums and institutes^note Only one running and complete EV1 is known to exist, at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., a decision which is highly debated both then and now. To this day, GM regrets this decision. Then-CEO Rick Wagoner has stated repeatedly that canceling the EV1 program was the worst decision of his tenure, stating, "It didn't affect profitability, but it did affect image." while then R&D chief Larry Burns stated, "We could have had the Chevrolet Volt ten years earlier." Indeed, GM relentlessly pursuing the development of the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid was partially intended to atone for this.
    • To expand on Wagoner's remark, the cancellation of the EV1 program was a long-standing PR disaster for GM that the company spent years digging itself out from under. The EV1 admittedly had its problems; it lost lots of money for GM, and the car itself wasn't a practical replacement for gasoline-powered cars (it went less than 100 miles on a charge, only seated two people, and couldn't be reliably driven in states with volatile and cold climates such as GM's native state of Michigan). However, GM's failure to continue to develop and refine its alternative fuel technology is generally seen as a blunder in the wake of rising gas prices late in the '00s, the emerging market for electric vehicles that resulted from it, and the billions GM had to spend to start over and develop the Chevrolet Volt, a much more substantial vehicle that seats four, recharges itself, and can be driven in any climate or weather condition. GM's decision to destroy the EV1s during the launch and heavy promotion of the fuel-thirsty Hummer H2 SUV, a PR disaster in itself, and led to accusations from conspiracy theorists that GM was maliciously trying to sabotage the idea of electric vehicles under pressure from oil companies, including the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, added to the controversy, and was made worse by the concurrent launch of the second-generation Toyota Prius. The Prius was a major commercial success that gave competitor Toyota the image of being a world leader in the development of alternative-fuel vehicles, despite the Prius being significantly less advanced than the EV1 and Toyota itself not possessing technology that could hold a candle to GM's research at the time.
      
      When GM lobbied for a government bailout in 2008, critics argued that GM had nobody to blame but itself for its current financial crisis and hung the EV1 over its head as an example of how the company made itself uncompetitive by abandoning long-term business strategies in the pursuit of short-term profits. Later summarizing the situation for Time magazine, automotive journalist Dan Neil wrote that, while the EV1 was a money-loser that was "horrifically expensive to build", by crushing them, "[GM's executives] hand[ed] its detractors yet another stick to beat them with. GM, the company that had done more to advance EV technology than any other, became the company that 'killed the electric car.'" On the concurrent launch of the 2003 Hummer H2, Neil wrote, "One struggles to think of a worse vehicle at a worse time. Introduced shortly after 9/11 — an event whose causes were tangled in America's unquenchable thirst for oil — the Hummer H2 sent all the wrong signals...[GM launching and marketing the H2 while it was removing the EV1s from the road] contributed to GM's emerging image as the Dick Cheney of car companies."
• Bayer, the German pharmaceutical/chemical giant, invented heroin as what they hoped would be a less addictive substitute for morphine. It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Needless to say, Bayer does not mention this piece of history anywhere they can help it.
• Many German corporations that existed through the Nazi period, such as Siemens and the aforementioned Bayer, now treat the time period of 1933-1945 as a blank space in their histories and disown just about any contribution they made to the Third Reich. German automaker Volkswagen, which was founded by Hitler himself as part of a Nazi initiative to provide cheap transportation for the entire German population, takes this trope up to eleven by erasing the aforementioned from its own history; indeed, the modern story of Volkswagen's founding from the company itself is so ambiguous that it almost suggests the Beetle appeared out of thin air during the British occupation. Mercedes-Benz (who's namesake Mercedes Jellinek, along with her father Emil, was of Jewish descent, ironically enough) has averted this in recent times, as their official museum in Stuttgart now openly admits to the company's complicity in the Third Reich and use of forced labour.
• The section of Mercedes-Benz's aforementioned official museum in Stuttgart focusing on their motorsports unit conspicuously avoids discussion of why they gave up racing in 1955, despite the fact that the Mercedes driver was completely blameless for the alleged race car.
• Coca-Cola's exhibit of its history at its corporate headquarters makes almost no mention of New Coke, nor of the cocaine that featured in the original recipe.
• As in Germany, every major Japanese corporation that existed during World War II, such as Mitsubishi, aided the Japanese war effort. They also tend to leave this fact out of their official biographies.
• Harley-Davidson once produced a commemorative line of motorcycles called the Confederate Edition, following the 1976 Liberty Edition line in celebration of the United States' bicentennial. As the use of Confederate iconography was and still remains a contentious issue to this day (complicated by the First Amendment among other things, not to mention the Ku Klux Klan having politicians and other notable people in its ranks), Harley disavowed any existence of the CE until fairly recently; the model is not on display at the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, but is kept at the company's archives.
• Upon pulling the plug on producing and marketing the Galaxy Note 7 following the now infamous battery explosion scandal, Samsung removed practically all traces of the device from their official literature, including the introduction video they uploaded on YouTube.
  • They even went so far as to issue a DMCA on a video showing a Grand Theft Auto V mod depicting the phone as a sticky bomb, but we all know what happened afterward. Strangely enough, they only went after those who uploaded Note 7 parody videos, but not the Grand Theft Auto fansites who host the mod in question.
  • Samsung later went on to produce a revised variant of the Note 7 called the Galaxy Note FE, with a smaller battery and the reassurance that it won't burst into flames. It was only available in select Asian markets though.
• With the utter failure of Cécile and Marie-Grace from the American Girls Collection roster, the company was keen at getting rid of most if not all references to the two characters. Whilst mini dolls and books from some of the retired/archived characters are still for sale, not a single item is available for the poor duo. In 2020, though, when American Girl decided to offer free ebooks of every current book with a black main character and some (but not all) that had been long out of print, they included the duo's central series and Cécile's mystery.
• Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, most famous for designing the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center reflected poorly on his design for the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Missouri, a 31-building complex that was praised as a centerpiece of the city's urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s before becoming notorious as a segregated community prone to violence, poverty and worsening quality of living. The entirety of the complex was demolished by the mid-1970s.
• Sega seemingly wants to pretend their 1990s marketing and business decisions never happened. The internet won't let them forget about "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" in a hurry, though.
• Originally designed and marketed as an electric back massager, the Hitachi Magic Wand ended up having an enduring popularity as a sex toy, so much so that they briefly discontinued the device out of concerns over its brand image being associated with pornography and/or sexual activity. They were however persuaded by sex toy manufacturer Vibratex to resume production of the device, though Hitachi has understandably disassociated themselves from the brand, now simply referred to as the Magic Wand Original or Original Magic Wand.
• When the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to set up a private collection of steam locomotives for display in Strasburg, PA, they saved at least one example from most of the classes for posterity. Of those they didn't, some of them were major failures in the eyes of the railroad—its experimental "Duplex" drive engines chief among them. Such engines, including the T1 4-4-4-4, the S1 6-4-4-6, the Q1 4-6-4-4, the Q2 4-4-6-4, and the ill-fated S2 6-8-6 steam turbine, were all made to try and circumvent the weaknesses of conventional steam locomotives when it was otherwise unnecessary, creating massive maintenance headaches that spent more time in the shop than they did out on the road. Tellingly, the fact that none of them survived meant the railroad saw them as simple scrap value. While some had already been scrapped by the time the collection was put together, a few others still weren't spared, such as the N1 2-10-2 (presumably for its drag-engine status), the I1 2-10-0 (one did survive, but it was spared by a preservation group rather than the railroad itself), and the J1 2-10-4 (which was based on a Chesapeake and Ohio design, hence why it likely wasn't saved). Tellingly, a group is currently working to bring the T1 back to life with a new member.
• Supposedly, the New York Central Railroad's president at the time, Alfred E. Perlman, was not interested in saving any of the railroad's steam locomotives because he saw them as "outdated technology". It's true that Perlman, who was laser-focused on trying to save the cash-strapped line from having to pay out of pocket for airways and highways due to government regulations, wasn't concerned about the past, but he was evidently so adamant against sparing any of the steamers that he flat out told the Smithsonian Institute he wasn't going to sell them the last of their famed 4-6-4 Hudsons, and ordered it scrapped immediately thereafter. Of the engines that did survive, two of them made it by accident—the first, 4-8-2 Mohawk 3001, was disguised as a Texas and Pacific mountain to replace a scrapped 2-10-4 on display in Dallas, while the other, 4-8-2 2933, was literally hidden behind boxes to keep it safe until it was found out about, and Perlman was publicly embarrassed into donating it to St. Louis. Another engine, the famous 4-4-0 999 that supposedly broke the 100 mph barrier for steam engines first, was similarly forced to be saved in spite of his objections. The guy really must not have liked steam engines.
• Stewart Kenny, CEO and co-founder of the Irish gambling giant Paddy Power, resigned from the company's board of directors in 2016 and denounced the entire industry, accusing it of profiting off of addiction and problem gambling (especially with the rise of online gambling) and doing nothing about it.

Print Media

• The Daily Mail, one of the more prominent British Newspapers, would rather forget the fact that it used to be the mouthpiece for Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain's major fascist party, the British Union of Fascists, in the 1930s. But its critics aren't going to let it forget the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" anytime soon.
• Another British newspaper, the Daily Mirror, also supported the Blackshirt movement for a time in the mid-1930s; notably, both it and the Mail were owned by Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, who was a supporter of Nazi Germany and a known acquaintance of Adolf Hitler. Nowadays, it's a staunchly left-wing, pro-Labour paper that would like to forget its 1930s ownership and editorial stances.
• In the U.S., The New York Times took a long time to fully own up to how compromised the reporting of Walter Duranty, who was friends with Stalin and suppressed news of things like the Ukrainian famine, was during the 1930s.
• MAD illustrator Tom Richmond had previously drawn four articles for the magazine's rival Cracked at the Turn of the Millennium. According to his blog, he is ashamed of all four articles to varying degrees. His first piece was a Godzilla parody that he wrote and drew himself with the intent of submitting to MAD as a sample; when they turned it down, he instead sent it to Cracked and was surprised to find that they ran it as an article! (And he was just as surprised to find that the art was not re-scaled properly, causing it to be vertically stretched.) While parodies of The Sopranos and of X-Men largely ran without incident (other than Richmond later considering his art too cartoony), the latter saw then-editor Dick Kulpa crop the splash page for use on the front cover without credit or compensation. Kulpa also repeatedly called Richmond a "flagship" artist despite paying him the same as everyone else. However, the final straw was when Tom was told that his parody of Gladiator would not be run in color because the editors wanted to do a parody of Battlefield Earth in color instead. This decision led Tom to stop working for Cracked and give MAD another try; thankfully, they accepted him this time, and his work at Cracked remains buried in the past.

Countries

• France has apologized for the crimes committed by Vichy France during the Occupation with Jacques Chirac admitting that during the war, French Police co-operated with the Nazis in carrying out The Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath till the 60s, this wasn't the case however, and the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity was controversial at the time for the fact that it pointed out that La Résistance was a tiny minority during the Occupation (contrary to Charles de Gaulle's politically expedient noble lie about the "myth of the Resistance"), that it was outnumbered by Les Collaborateurs and the vast majority of French citizens were apathetic or indifferent to the Occupation.
  • France's colonial history is also seen as highly shameful by several French philosophers and writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre said he considered colonialism to be a form of theft and he and several fellow philosophers controversially defended violence committed against French colonial authorities in Algeria and Indo-China as justified actions of rebellion against The Empire.
  • The Pantheon, the Hall of Fame for Great French Thinkers has in recent times been used as symbolic restitution for the suffering of colonialist rebels. Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, who was betrayed by Napoléon Bonaparte was symbolically interned in the Pantheon as a form of atonement for Bonaparte restoring slavery after the First Republic abolished it. Louis Delgres, the Revolutionary from Guadeloupe was also interned later^note symbolically, since he and his fellow rebels blew themselves up with gunpowder rather than submit to re-enslavement, and recently the French government has acknowledged the Atlantic Slave Trade and France's participation in it as a crime against humanity.

• Germany took a while to come to terms with the Third Reich.
  • In the immediate aftermath, Konrad Adenauer accepted responsibility for crimes committed against Jews and paid reparations to survivors, families and heavily invested in Israel to develop a new basis of relationships for Germany. However, Adenauer was opposed to Denazification and reinstalled war criminals such as Heinz Guderian and promoted "the myth of the Wehrmacht", i.e. the major fighting force was by-and-large tangential to the political repression committed by the regime as a whole, and that the sufferings and losses of Germany's fighting men were untainted by The Holocaust, when in actual fact the Wehrmacht was heavily involved in carrying out war crimes in the Ostfront. Germans disliked Hitler at this time because he "lost the war", not because they had come to view him as truly evil... yet.
  • This changed in The '60s and The '70s. In 1985, German President Richard von Weizsäcker gave a famous speech where he noted that the end of the war was not a defeat for Germany but "a day of liberation" accepting full responsibility for the Holocaust, and acknowledging all the victims persecuted by the Nazis: Jews, homosexuals, and the Romani. He also acknowledged that the German public had knowledge about the genocide as it was occurring.
    Richard von Weizsäcker: We must not regard the end of the war as the cause of flight, expulsion, and deprivation of freedom. The cause goes back to the start of the tyranny that brought about war. We must not separate 8 May 1945 from 30 January 1933.
    • However, an official apology to homosexual victims of the Holocaust did not come until 2002. Germany passed a law pardoning those convicted under the anti-homosexuality law Paragraph 175 in 2017.
  • In Modern Germany, and United Germany, the Holocaust is taken very seriously, is commemorated by a major memorial by Peter Eisenman, there are memorial plaques across the country. Denying the Holocaust is a serious crime there, and their justice system is merciless to any groups who show even the slightest sign of Neo-Nazism. They will not tolerate the Swastika unless used for educational or artistic purposes.
• Japan's more moderate citizens are horrified with their actions in the war such as the Bataan Death March, the Nanjing Massacre, or the sadistic human experimentation in Unit 731. Although their more ultra-nationalistic right-wingers are still less than willing to admit such.
  • World War II, in general, remains a very sore subject for Japan - not only for the aforementioned war crimes, but also the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attempts to teach the subject in Japanese elementary and high schools have, historically, been fraught with great difficulty: any history textbooks published in Japan in the years following the end of the war redacted anything pertaining to the war, while modern textbooks tend to glance over the war and the Japanese Empire's actions from the turn of the century until after the war.
• The United Kingdom media and government both see their treatment of Alan Turing as this. Turing was an instrumental code-breaker of the German naval 'Enigma' code in World War II, and essentially the founder of the entire field of computer science... until he was outed as homosexual, consequentially subjected to criminal prosecution, and sentenced to 'chemical castration' through estrogen injections, leading to his suicide.
• The United States looks back with shame for the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII. In fact, they paid $20,000 in reparations to all survivors and their descendants in 1988, and most of the people who consider Franklin D. Roosevelt one of the greatest presidents of all time (and FDR's family) like to pretend he never was responsible for being the proponent of the internement.
  • Also, the slavery of Native Americans and Blacks before the 20th century can be seen as a scar and act of hypocrisy in the United States.
  • The interesting thing about this is that nowadays, the notorious former head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover gets a little extra leeway whenever anyone finds out he opposed the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent back during WWII, whereas, as mentioned above, Franklin D. Roosevelt's name gets tarnished for being the primary proponent of said internment. Back during WWII, the general attitudes of both would've been reversed regarding the situation.
  • There's a reason there aren't many films about the Mexican-American War or the Philippine-American War. In fact, you might be hearing about those wars for the first time here.
    • The Mexican-American War does get some screen time... but mostly because it lets the filmmakers show the generals of the American Civil War when they were young. And in the same army.
    • The Alamo is a very visible exception, being seen as a key moment in American history. Although it wasn’t actually part of the Mexican-American War, both were part of the larger border conflict between Mexico and Texas. It has been getting less screen time in recent decades, though, and even when it was it would often gloss over exactly who Davy Crocket was fighting and maybe even why.
• Canada also has its share of shame for the poor treatment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII which included the forcible deportation of thousands. Shortly after the American compensation package was announced, PM Brian Mulroney announced that the federal government would provide $21,000 in compensation to every surviving person who was interned, would restore citizenship to any internee that was deported, and would donate $12 million to the National Association of Japanese Canadians.
  • The Canadian government also seems to be trying to forget its earlier internment of eastern Europeans during WWI. In one camp in Kapuskasing, there is a statue of a down-trodden man, and a small plaque (with what appear to be bullet holes) on a concrete pyramid, sitting in the middle of a field off to the side of a two-lane highway. Unless you get out of the car and walk across the train tracks, you'd be forgiven for guessing it was an extension of the cemetery on the other side of the road.
  • Canada also has its share of colonial shame of First Nations people under their rule, which some Native people are quick to point out.
    • In particular, as recently as 1996 (for context, that's the year Star Trek: First Contact came out), the government was still operating a native residential schools program that was devised to westernize native children. It has been blamed for traumatizing generations of kids (and the deaths of thousands) and the federal government has spent a goodly part of the last two decades apologizing for the program's existence.
  • During the Cold War, Canada had a secret program called PROFUNC which spied on suspected Communists and Communist-sympathizers. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police developed dossiers on 16,000 Communist party members/supporters and over 50,000 suspected sympathizers including details on their families, exact movements, and pre-filled arrest documents that were kept constantly updated. In the event of war with the Soviet Union (the so-called Mobilization Day), the RCMP would immediately round up everyone on the PROFUNC lists and ship them off to internment camps.
  • Pierre Trudeau invoking the War Measures Act, suspending all civil liberties and instituting martial law, during the October Crisis of 1970 is this for some. In response to the backlash, the WMA was replaced by the Emergencies Act in 1988 (which placed far more limits on government power in emergencies).
• During the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the whole history of China was lavishly depicted, except the last 100 years, including the 1912 revolution, the rise to power of the (still ruling) Communist Party and the founding of the People's Republic. (Not to mention the Cultural Revolution.) Rather strange, given how these feats were usually celebrated in China.
  • Of course, under pure Maoism, only the last hundred years or so would have been considered worthy of mention given its central tenet of breaking with China's feudal past. Currently, the Chinese Communist Party regards Mao Zedong himself as an Old Shame, acknowledging his central role in the revolution but also admitting that Mao was, in fact, fallible and his teachings not to be taken strictly at face value. The current regime is downplaying Maoism in favor of "Deng Xiaopeng Thought" (embracing the free market, decision-making based upon fact rather than adherence to dogma, and limited social reforms). The 2008 Olympics opening ceremony was probably an official public acknowledgment of the transition. Communist nations are/were notorious for these sorts of historical retcons, and China more than most of them.
  • China today has no problem with its feudal past. But it does have the problems with its recent history. You will rarely hear the Cultural Revolution mentioned, much less explained or discussed at length, in contemporary China. But that minimalism pales in comparison to the near-silence about the Tiananmen Square protests ... and how they were put down, regardless of how much the rest of the world knows about it.
• Pretty much every country in which settlers have abused the natives. There have even been apologies for infecting natives with deadly Eurasian diseases, which for the most part was completely accidental.
  • From Australia we have The Stolen Generations. A more recent shame is that it wasn't until 2008 that the Australian government finally issued a formal apology.
• Russia's bad history of Anti-Semitism from the Tsarist regime, to the Soviet Union, and even The New Russia ^note although Jews do not face a lot of legal restrictions nor have rights stomped under The New Russia, they still face very nasty antisemitism from Neo-Nazis and ultranationalist groups can fall into this category and is a problematic issue in modern Russia. During Red October, Vladimir Lenin denounced anti-semitism and saw it as a great evil affecting the working class and organized anti-racist policies to curb it, however, Stalin reversed many of these initiatives after World War II. Recently, Vladimir Putin took a strong stance against antisemitism and called out on Russia's bad history of it.
  • One of Nikita Khrushchev's first acts after seizing power was denouncing Stalin. His motives were fairly self-serving, hypocritical and inaccurate^note His true motivation was to rub away all of Stalin's old appointees and attack their legitimacy so that he could move and promote his own men into the old positions, a manner not dissimilar from how Stalin did business. Khrushchev himself willingly served Stalin during his reign and conducted and oversaw purges in Ukraine, for the same reason everyone else oversaw the purges, to get noticed and promoted. However, Khrushchev did take responsibility and denounced Stalin's anti-semitic campaigns, restored the reputations of some of the people who faced injustice during The Purge. This speech was controversial because many Communist nations, chiefly China, had invoked Stalin and his role in the Soviet Union's victory over the Nazis as a symbol of legitimacy.
  • Under Gorbachev, during Glasnost and Perestroika: the Soviet Union admitted responsibility for the Katyn Massacre, The Gulag, and other misdemeanors, while also admitting their regrets for cracking down on the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring.
• January 26 used to be a special non-working holiday in commemoration for "EDSA Dos" or the second People Power revolution in the Philippines back in the 2000s. Similar to the first EDSA revolution, a corrupt president was overthrown by the people and a new one rises. However, this "second" EDSA is more of overthrowing then President Joseph "Erap" Estrada who was charged for using the government's budget for illegal gambling and his replacement is his Vice President, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who later on turned out to be no different than the other trapos (or traditional corrupt politicians). It doesn't help that Arroyo is accused of cheating during the 2004 presidential elections and other corruption charges that she and her family are involved during her term while Estrada was pardoned by her government later on. As time goes on, a lot of Filipinos don't celebrate "EDSA Dos" and would rather forget that it ever existed since it's nothing more than helping a corrupt politician rise into power.
• The 1492 Alhambra Decree, which forced Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity or face expulsion from Spain, is viewed as Old Shame by the modern Spanish government insofar that in the 2010s, descendants of those expelled were offered Spanish citizenship regardless of their native nationalities. Other similar late-15th and early-16th Century Spanish decrees that targeted Spain's Muslim populations are not viewed any more favorably in modern Spain.

Politics

• Fidel Castro expressed regret and apologized for homophobic policies in Cuba in The '60s and The '70s, admitting that he was responsible for many of the injustices faced by LGBT people and that he regrets a lot of the homophobic statements he made.
• Remember Alabama Governor George Wallace? Remember how he overtly barred black students from entering a previously all-white school until the President himself sent federal marshals to enforce integration? Wallace wasn't too proud of that in later years:
  Wallace: I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over.
  • Wallace would claim that he had planned on supporting civil rights once he had secured his position in the political hierarchy much as LBJ did as Vice-President and President (as a senator LBJ continually sided with his segregationist colleagues, working to water down the original Civil Rights Act of 1957). However, Wallace's actual views are subject to some debate. While there are some signs that his obsessive advocacy of segregation was due to Pandering to the Base, there are even more signs that he did, at least to some degree, hold racist views even before this. In his career as a judge he was even-handed and fair to black defendants (and lawyers) who appeared in his courtroom, to a far greater extent than anyone had any reason to expect from an Alabama judge during the time period, but in private was a virulent racist who believed Black people were fundamentally inferior and subhuman. His career as a segregationist also started long before he had gubernatorial (or presidential) ambitions, albeit far more moderately. And while he did enjoy an NAACP endorsement in his first gubernatorial campaign, this was almost certainly a political calculation on the part of organization, who greatly preferred Wallace to his opponent, the Klan-supported John M. Patterson.^note Patterson had been a firm opponent of the NAACP who, among other things, prevented the organization from even establishing itself as a legal entity within Alabama's borders. Patterson, interestingly enough, has also painted himself as someone who embraced segregation as a means of winning votes. In other words, Wallace might have been a racist, but at least he was a fair-minded racist, and it was losing to Patterson that sparked Wallace's decision to become the arch-segregationist that history would remember him as. The truth largely seems to be that Wallace was a racist and a segregationist who nevertheless was less racist and segregationist than he pretended to be to win votes, and whose regrets are rooted in the fact that he drove himself into political irrelevance.
  • Hazel Bryan, as noted on the Real Life section of Offscreen Inertia, is forever immortalized as a snarling racist in a famous picture depicting desegregation. Years later she has abandoned her racism and befriended her former black enemies, but the picture still causes her to be remembered as a racist.
• When the conservative magazine National Review launched in 1955, its articles initially argued that segregation was a states'-rights issue that the federal government should just stay out of. In at least two of its articles — written by founder and executive editor William F. Buckley Jr. — the magazine took the stance that segregation was justified due to a need maintain white ("the superior race") control over government and social order. By the time of the 60s, it was already moderating its stance on white supremacy, motivated in part by the embarrassment of being associated with figures such as the above-mentioned George Wallace, and in part because the Civil Rights Movement was starting to reveal the unconscionable costs that came along with it.
• During President Reagan's first term as governor of California, he signed an abortion bill into law, for which he never quite forgave himself over the rest of his staunchly-conservative life.
  • He also signed the first modern gun-control law, forbidding civilians from carrying guns on city streets,^note It had been introduced by an equally conservative Republican legislator in response to the Black Panthers openly carrying and citing the Second Amendment as allowing them to do so. something rather at odds with his position on the issue later as president. On the other hand, his position as president is at odds with his position later in life, when he supported the Brady Bill (which, of course, was named for the man who took a bullet for him), a change in heart prompted by a very narrow brush with a would-be assassin.
  • Reagan also regretted that he played a villain in the last movie he ever starred in: The Killers. It was also the only time he ever played a villain. His reason for disliking it was mostly snob-ism (he saw it as a B-Movie made for TV production and not a prestigious role). Interestingly film critics generally consider it his best work as an actor and the film is a Cult Classic.
• Ex-British Prime Minister David Cameron apparently feels this way about his support for Section 28 (a rampantly homophobic policy introduced by the Thatcher government). He's since apologised for the harm it caused and presided over the implementation of marriage equality in the UK despite some rather forceful opposition from his voter base.
• The Waco Siege was a dark mark on the FBI's reputation in dealing with hostage situations.
  • Nor is that one of their agents was secretly The Consigliere to Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger (who laid low after being told of a possible racketeering indictment for 16 years before he was captured in 2011). That the FBI turned a blind eye to Bulger's criminal activities for years was also another source of contention.
• Bill Clinton has said he regrets signing DOMA (the "Defense of Marriage Act," which sought to outlaw any US recognition of gay marriage), and before it was repealed by the Supreme Court, he said he wanted Barack Obama to repeal it. Congressman Bob Barr (who briefly joined the Libertarian Party before going back to the Republicans) has also renounced his support for DOMA (he was one of its Congressional co-sponsors).
  • Bill Clinton regretted the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy which prohibited openly gay service members in the military. He also called on Barack Obama to repeal it and was thankful when he did so.
  • Bill Clinton also apologized publicly for the agricultural policies he supported as president that led to economic disaster in Haiti.
  • Bill Clinton has also since regretted the international response to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, admitting that more should have been done to end the violence known to have been unfolding.
  • He also regrets approving the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which contributed to the 2008 recession. Though, in Clinton's defense, the repeal was passed in veto-proof majorities.
  • He has also admitted that his tough-on-crime policies (most infamously the "Three Strikes" law) contributed to the over-incarceration of Americans with poor and non-white people being the biggest victims. That said, many poor and non-white communities did (initially) support the tough-on-crime laws as their communities were suffering from violent crime. Clearly, the man has a lot of regrets.
  • The exact reason for these admittances is debatable: it may be due to the fact that the Democratic Party moved to the left after his presidency and he now had to espouse these positions in order to benefit the candidacies of his wife, a genuine reflection of his choices and the effects they had, or a combination of both.
• Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, came to regret his enthusiastic support for North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Although initially dismissive of potential job losses during the deal's ratification, Reich later admitted that he should've pushed for stronger wage insurance and retraining policies that would've help American workers who had their jobs outsourced.
• Hubert Humphrey came to feel this about his public support for the Vietnam War. For starters, he opposed the war at the start and attempted to warn LBJ off of it. When this failed, Johnson froze him out of important meetings and briefings. Humphrey reluctantly chose to publicly support the war partly out of old loyalty to LBJ, and partly to get his seat back at the table. Needless to say in the years after 1968, he spent a good deal of time atoning in public for it until his reputation eventually recovered in the 1970s.
• George W. Bush sees his 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech as this, which came mere weeks after he had authorized the military occupation of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein and cripple his alleged weapons of mass destruction. His speech, delivered on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declaring major combat operations in Iraq to be over beneath a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished", had its implications quickly capitalized on by war critics as Iraq fell into civil war, costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the following decade; Bush has since insisted that the banner was meant for the sailors of said aircraft carrier and regrets the message it instead came to convey.
• At the start of the Iraq War, French opposition to the American-led war effort led to a surge in anti-French sentiment that saw, among other things, some restaurants to rename French fries as "freedom fries". Walter B. Jones, one of the Congressmen who led the effort to get the House of Representatives' cafeteria to adopt the "freedom fries" moniker, later came to view it as an embarrassment, especially after he turned against the Iraq War. The fries in the House cafeteria quietly became French again in 2006.
• Clint Eastwood has gone on to say that his infamous 2012 Republican National Convention speech - in which he talked to an empty chair and pretended it was Barack Obama - was "silly" and that he should've approached the angle differently.
• Basically any high-profile politician, advisor, or political commentator who has switched from right to left or left to right (or otherwise changed their partisan or ideological preferences in some dramatic fashion) will regard much of their old career this way. Depending on how late this conversion happened, this can result in a great deal of their previous body of work — arguments, writings, speeches, etc becoming deeply embarrassing and rarely acknowledged, beyond a quick dismissive talking-point about “my former life.”
  • The conservative writer David Horowitz was an ardent Marxist for many years before converting to the right in the 1980s. His 1996 memoir, Radical Son, is basically just a long denunciation of all the projects he spent his young adulthood doing.
  • Likewise for Norman Podherotz, editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. His ideological transition from left to right over the course of the 1960s was soon reflected by Commentary's editorial line, going from the leading magazine of the anti-Stalinist Jewish left to one of the main incubators of what came to be called neoconservatism, an ideology born from former leftists who, like Podherotz, had lost faith in both the USSR and the ability of the Western left to respond effectively to it.
  • It Was All a Lie by Stuart Stevens is a former Republican devoting an entire book to trashing all the conservative causes he himself once promoted.
  • The Bulwark is a so-called "Never Trump" publication featuring many ex-Republican writers/consultants/podcasters who turned against their former party during the Donald Trump adminstration, feeling that not only was it taken over by far-right extremists but that the seeds for such a takeover were there all along. Apologies for past work and activism is a common theme. Charlie Sykes, who hosts their lead podcast, was a right-wing radio talk show host for 20 years who now self identifies as a centrist supporter of Joe Biden. He often speaks ruefully of his old radio show and many of the speeches and events he hosted as a Republican. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (where Sykes is from) in particular is often spoken of as someone he deeply regrets ever supporting.
  • Whittaker Chambers was, in the interwar period, a member of the Communist Party USA and part of a Soviet spy ring called the Ware Group. He lost faith in communism in the late 1930s after Josef Stalin's Great Purge and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the beginning of a drift to the right in the 1940s that culminated in him testifying against the Ware Group during the Alger Hiss espionage trial in 1949, the subject of his 1952 autobiography/anti-communist text Witness. In 1957, he became a senior editor for William F. Buckley Jr.'s conservative magazine National Review. The author Daniel Oppenheimer, in his book Exit Right, described Chambers as somebody whose worldview didn't really change all that much even as his politics did, merely substituting faith in communism for faith in God.
• Candace Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), left the group in 1985, stating that the organization strayed from her original intent. She said that it effectively became a neo-prohibitionist organization, even though she started it to address and deal with the issue of drunk driving.
• George L. Kelling was the criminologist who, in 1982, came up with the "broken windows theory" of policing with James Q. Wilson, stating that law enforcement ignoring minor crimes and letting them go unpunished (for instance, vandals smashing windows in a neighborhood) will eventually snowball into a wave of far more serious crimes because the lack of police attention to the small stuff makes it clear to criminals that nobody will stop them. He intended for law enforcement to look at his theory and embrace community policing, street patrols, and alternatives to arrests and incarceration for minor crimes, but was instead horrified to see police chiefs like New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton use it to justify an All Crimes Are Equal approach, to the point of having an Oh, Crap! reaction.
  Kelling: You’re just asking for a whole lot of trouble. You don’t just say one day, "go out and restore order." You train officers, you develop guidelines. Any officer who really wants to do order maintenance has to be able to answer satisfactorily the question, "why do you decide to arrest one person who’s urinating in public and not arrest [another]?" ... And if you can’t answer that question, if you just say "well, it’s common sense," you get very, very worried. So yeah, there’s been a lot of things done in the name of Broken Windows that I regret.

Sports

• The Atlanta Spirit Group considers the Atlanta Thrashers (now the second generation Winnipeg Jets) an embarrassment, removing all references to the team, including the team's lone divisional championship banner and a mural from when the team hosted the 2008 All-Star Game, from Philips Arena. The team would have been less of a joke if the group spent more money operating the team rather than being involved in a 5-year internal legal battle.
• The Baltimore Orioles Major League Baseball team began playing in 1954. The club doesn't like to admit they actually date back to 1894 as the Milwaukee Brewers. In 1902 they moved to become the St. Louis Browns and played there for 52 years before being sold and moved to Baltimore. Not only did the Orioles change the team's name, but just to further distance themselves from the Browns traded seventeen players to the Yankees. The Orioles acknowledge none of their records from St. Louis (including their only pennant there from 1944), nor do they recognize any of their players from prior to 1954, leaving the former in-town rival Cardinals to honor greats like George Sisler.
• In a similar fashion, the Washington Nationals don't seem to want to acknowledge their existence as the Montreal Expos after their 2005 relocation. The Expos' retired numbers were reissued by the second season the Nationals played in Washington, and no trace of Expos merchandise can be found in the team's store. To make matters worse, the Expos made it to the postseason once as part of a strike-shortened year in 1981. They likely would have made it again in 1994 had another players' strike not cancelled the playoffs. This was later subverted when they decided to honor former Expos Tim Raines and Vladimir Guerrero on the team Ring of Honor and wore throwback Expos uniforms during a regular season series against the Royals.
• During a football (soccer) game between Denmark and Sweden, a man ran in and tried to punch the referee in the face. The referee was understandably pissed, but it caused Denmark to be disqualified. It's not old shame for Denmark, but old shame for the man, who did the deed.
• Former Oklahoma Sooners and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Brian Bosworth is ashamed of most of his antics during his college years, such as the infamous incident where he wore a t-shirt that read "National Communists Against Athletes" during the 1987 Orange Bowl. However, he especially regrets publishing his autobiography "The Boz", believing that it resulted in the NCAA investigation that ruined Oklahoma's program and destroyed head coach Barry Switzer's career.
• NBA star Steve Nash is ashamed of a famous picture from his Dallas Mavericks days (though he thanks that unlike Dirk Nowitzki, "it wasn’t me on someone’s back.").
• The "home run derby" era of the late 1990s and early 2000s saw baseball rise to heights of popularity not seen in decades, with sluggers like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa becoming superstars almost as big as Michael Jordan. Then it was discovered that most of those guys were doped up to their eyeballs, and a series of exposes and Congressional investigations devastated the sport's reputation. Nowadays, Major League Baseball and American baseball fans rank that time next to such moments as the Black Sox scandal as one of the most disgraceful episodes in baseball history.
• In 2004, during a game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees at Fenway Park, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees was hit by a pitch and began berating the pitcher. Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek stepped in to defend the pitcher, and ended up shoving his glove into A-Rod's face◊, sparking an enormous bench-clearing brawl. Although the incident is considered the turning point for the Red Sox in what would become their first championship season in 86 years, Varitek still refuses to sign copies of the iconic photo.
  Jason Varitek: He started yelling at my pitcher. I knew Bronson [Arroyo, the Red Sox pitcher] didn't hit him intentionally. I told him to get to first base. He yelled back at me, said the F-word a few times, and "Come on", and it eventually came on.
• The New England Patriots consider their disastrous 1990 season to be a stain on their history. While the team was competitive for most of the 1980s - including their cinderella 1985 season where they made an improbable Super Bowl run to serve as The Chew Toy for Mike Ditka's gruesome Chicago Bears - the magic had run out by the end of the decade, as the cinderella era players were past their prime and the team wasn't doing a good job drafting young talent to replace them. Raymond Berry, the coach that lead the cinderella team, was fired and replaced with Rod Rust, an aging defensive coordinator who had no head coaching experience. The 1990 season started off well enough, with a close loss to the Miami Dolphins followed by a close victory over the Indianapolis Colts. The bottom fell out the day after when Boston Herald sports reporter Lisa Olson alleged that she was sexually harassed by multiple players in the team's locker room. The incident gained national attention, ignited a debate about women in sports journalism and sparked a major media firestorm that was made worse when then-owner Victor Kiam responded by calling Olson a "classic bitch". The controversy, which is now regarded as a watershed moment for women in sports journalism, hung over the Patriots for the rest of the season and likely played a role in them not winning another game, finishing with a 1-15 record which was the worst of the 16 game era at the time. The controversy combined with the team's poor play also caused a steep decline in ticket sales, with later home games seeing Foxborough Stadium only filled to half-capacity. Rust and General Manager Patrick Sullivan were fired at the season's end while fallout from the scandal continued to haunt the team throughout the next season as well. By the time all the dust had settled in 1992, Kiam had sold the team, Olson had relocated to Australia and the Patriots brand was damaged badly enough that they almost relocated to St. Louis.^note The only reason this didn't happen was because of Forborough Stadium owner Robert Kraft's refusal to let the team out of an agreement they made to play there until 2002. Kraft would later utilize this agreement to take over the team in 1994. The Patriots embarked on a aggressive rebranding for the 1993 season, retiring the red and white uniforms and the "Pat Patriot" logo they had been using since their establishment in 1960 in favor of the blue and silver uniforms and "Flying Elvis" logo they use today. They also brought famed New York Giants head coach Bill Parcells out of retirement to rebuild the team itself. This, combined with the team finding steady leadership under new owner Robert Kraft, laid the foundation for the extensive success they have enjoyed under Bill Belichick. The Patriots have since tried to bury this era as deep into the dustbin of history as they can - the old "Pat Patriot" logo and uniforms have rarely seen the light of day in the Belichick era and when Rod Rust passed away in 2018, his obituary from the team only mentioned his time as head coach with a single sentence in passing, preferring to instead focus on his contribution to their 1985 Super Bowl run as their defensive coordinator.
• Joe Paterno's biggest regret in the last weeks of his life was not paying close enough attention to what his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky had been doing for decades to do his best to stop it, something which had already cost him his job and also would briefly cost him his title of winningest coach in college football history.
• Brazil's loss in the 1950 FIFA World Cup final definitely counts. At first, the Brazilian team was winning most matches with ease and was well on its way to win the tournament. Meanwhile, Uruguay, the team they would be playing against in the defining match, had struggled throughout the tournament. With odds in their favor (they only needed a tie to win), Brazil was already seen as the clear winner, with newspaper articles naming them champions and song being written for their eventual victory. While Brazil started off winning the match by scoring first, Uruguay turned the game around by scoring two goals, and to the surprise of nearly everyone, won the tournament. This caused Brazilians to consider most things related to the tournament to be "cursed", such as the white and blue kit used by the team and even the players themselves.
• Since he was forced out of cycling in a doping scandal, Floyd Landis, now a cannabis farmer, has considered his cycling career as a whole to be this, to the point where he snapped at a journalist who asked how he felt about being considered one of the best cyclists in history.
  Floyd Landis: I don't care, and I don't even want to be on the fucking list. Leave me out of it.
• Argentine former football player, and Inter legend Javier Zanetti has told multiple times that what he considers to be "his worst defeat ever" was his failure to help then-teammate Adriano when he found out his father had died. Despite Zanetti's attempts, with the assistance of his teammates and even Inter's president Moratti, Adriano, who was easily one of the best players in the world at the time, drifted himself to alcohol and his career collapsed.
• In 2021, it was discovered that 11 years prior a Chicago Blackhawks video coach had sexually assaulted a player, and the team decided to not do anything until the end of an eventual Stanley Cup-winning postseason. It quickly became a mark of shame for everyone involved, with the two remaining executives from that period resigning, the coach of the time that had moved onto another team also quitting his new job, and the assaulter's name being stricken out of the Cup.
• Kerry Fraser is one of the longest-tenured National Hockey League referees, from 1973 to 2010. One 1993 playoff game ensured Toronto Maple Leafs fans absolutely hate his guts, as he didn't punish Wayne Gretzky for high-sticking Leafs captain Doug Gilmour (who visibly fell to the ice with blood in his forehead), allowing The Great One to score the game-winning goal shortly afterwards. When he wrote to The Players Tribune in 2016, he made sure to give a long account of that night, owning up to being wrong, saying he always tries to avoid the subject, and that it's the one thing he would correct in his career.

Other

• Chris Rock regrets creating his "Black People vs. Niggas" routine. Besides the "Stop Being Stereotypical" overtones, he feared that the routine would be used by actual racists to justify their racial hatred of black people. Sadly, Chris Rock turned out to be right.
• Jay Leno occasionally invokes this on his actor guests. All in good fun, of course.
  • Jay has his own Old Shame, Collision Course, a buddy cop movie he did with Pat Morita in the 1980s that he's described as being "a horrible movie".
• The BBC used to show, among other programmes, the hugely racist Black and White Minstrel Show. Up until 1978. The corporation regrets its attitudes now.
• <blink>. Lou Montulli issued an apology for accidentally creating the beast, which was left in as an Easter Egg that everybody loved to use. While Opera's the only browser outside the Netscape line to implement the tag, CSS would introduce a standardized alternative - with the caveat that browsers didn't actually have to implement it (most just quietly throw it away); another web standard requires an option to disable blinking (which Firefox buries in about:config).
  • Among old-time hackers, there's only one acceptable use for the blink tag: Schrodinger's Cat is <blink>NOT</blink> dead.
• The Nobel committee tries to gloss over the fact that they gave the award for Medicine to António Egas Moniz in 1949. They frequently invoke Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness when mentioning he won for discovering "the therapeutic value of leucotomy." To translate: He invented the lobotomy.
  • He also invented one of the world's first brain imaging techniques so that is usually highlighted instead.
  • Made worse by the fact that the prize was his primary motive – his lack of a Nobel had become a source of anxiety to him as his career and years had advanced. After he read the paper on the effects of damage to various parts of the frontal lobes and realized that it would be possible to duplicate some of these effects deliberately, one of the first thoughts to hit him was "This could get me my Nobel!" He had some specimen brains sent up to his office immediately so that he could start working out the best way to slice them up.
• The medical community internationally has some problems with the work done by, uh, certain German and Austrian doctors during the '30s and early '40s. Anatomist Hermann Stieve, for instance, did some groundbreaking work on the female reproductive system and how it responds to stress, among other things demonstrating that the rhythm method is inherently unreliable ... but he got this information by dissecting the bodies of executed political prisoners. Eduard Pernkopf's anatomical atlas is an artistic accomplishment and useful reference ... but it may have been based on dissection of executed prisoners, some of them perhaps inmates at concentration camps (and he was an ardent Nazi as well). Hans Asperger, remembered in the 21st century for his early work on autism, became more controversial in 2017-8 following new revelations in the English-speaking world about his enthusiasm for Nazism and involvement in Nazi eugenic forced sterilizations and murders of disabled children.
• E-mail addresses. Many people on the Internet started using it at young ages (it's getting more accentuated over time), where they thought it would be cool to fool around with random words, references to favorite series/movies and/or vulgarity. Then, flash forward some years, doing a college or job application, if you didn't bother to change to a less immature one while the efforts needed wouldn't be too much, then it's too late.
• The Y2K Scare. Particularly those who made apocalyptic omens, and those who thought every electric device was going to explode. The lack of any true ill effects was admittedly in big part due to the preemptive measures taken to alleviate it. This does not necessarily negate some of the very real concerns of the time, however due to the fact it was able to be resolved in the end, a mass panic of that scale had most likely been unnecessary in retrospect.
• December 21, 2012 (the end of the Mayan calendar), for anyone who predicted it would be the end of the world. Especially those who went "all-in": Built a bunker, stocked up on food and weapons, sold almost everything that wasn't vital for survival... Not to mention the deluge of other alleged apocalypses during history. (Point: The world still exists.) If you wanted to compile a list of shamed prophets and untrue prophecies, you'd need a whole new website.
• People that adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet may look on their life beforehand this way. Conversely, people who took up these diets and found them impractical can view these diets in such a manner also.
• The Marquis de Sade is understandably controversial and after his passing, his family was so ashamed of him they confiscated and burned all of his unpublished writings they could find (though some did slip through the cracks). Mention of the legendary noble became verboten for over a century, and it wasn't until the mid-20th century that his descendants revisited him and resurrected his legacy. Nowadays, the Marquis is celebrated for his contributions to Western thought, as well as his more benign pursuits over the course of his life - in particular, his fondness for wine and gourmet desserts - but his descendants are careful to remind people they don't endorse his depraved views, such as his tastes in and advocacy for murder and pedophilia, which they describe as "work of total delusion".
• Jason Schreier, a journalist for gaming website Kotaku, has expressed regret over an article encouraging readers to back Unsung Story, a kickstarted video game whose development turned into a giant clusterfuck.
• Aside from the examples listed in the Live Action TV, Film and Theater categories, many actors and actresses bemoan the fact that, early in their careers, they appeared naked in film or TV productions or photo shoots they might not have done if they had more experience/power to say no. The rise of the Internet has often brought these "old shame" moments to greater visibility as the scenes or photos have been recirculated (often on porn sites). In late 2017, the rise of the #Metoo movement resulted in a number of female performers stating regret for being required to do such scenes (often by unscrupulous producers or directors) for the sake of their career.
• It has become commonplace for past tweets, Facebook posts and other social media contributions made by politicians, actors, journalists, activists, and others to be examined (usually underlined with "This You?"). Often, controversial posts from years in the past have come back to bite people, resulting in backlash if the posts contradict currently expressed viewpoints - or, worse, contain content considered today (or when originally posted) to be sexist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc., with some people losing their jobs over them. This extends out of those in the public eye, with job-search experts now advising people to be careful what they post to social media lest it impact future employment prospects.
• In 1993, Alana, a student at Carleton University in Ottawa, used the term "involuntarily celibate" (or "invcel/incel") to describe her lack of success in dating, starting a website called Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project to act as a support group for people who were similarly unlucky in love and looking to find a mate. While Alana intended the site as a highly inclusive one open to all genders and sexualities, she eventually abandoned it due to a clique of sexist male users who blamed women as a whole for their lonely hearts. Later on, the term "incel" was rediscovered and appropriated by members of the "red pill" and "men going their own way" (or MGTOW) movements, who gave it its current meaning of a virulently misogynistic subculture of men who believed that women's freedom was less important than their sex lives. After the Isla Vista shooting in 2014, which had been carried out by a man who described himself as an incel and was motivated by such, Alana, by then having long forgotten the site, had a My God, What Have I Done? reaction at having popularized the term. She has since founded Love Not Anger, dedicated to getting men out of the incel movement while promoting the aims that her original project was trying to accomplish.
  "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it."
• According to the art critic Waldemar Januszczak, histories of art are strangely reluctant to mention that many of the important early figures in the Abstract Art movement were keen on the occult society known as Theosophy.
• Carolyn Bryant Donham would regret reporting an incident involving a certain black boy from Chicago years and years after his lynching shocked the nation.
  Carolyn Bryant Donham: Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.
• If an older building in the American South seems to have double the necessary amount of restrooms and water fountains for its size, that isn't them being doubly accommodating; those buildings were segregated and the extra facilities once had "colored" written over them. The most famous example is The Pentagon, built in 1941 in compliance with Virginia's Jim Crow laws. The United States Military and federal civil service were segregated at the time (following an order by Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson), which Harry Truman abolished in 1947. The Pentagon still has a huge number of bathrooms, but that turned out to be a fortunate thing when the number of women in the Department of Defense (both civilian and uniformed) increased over the years, requiring their own bathrooms.
• Susan Sarandon gave a number of interviews expressing bitterness over her role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, along the lines of the effect on her children reading stories about how their mother was a cult figure for having sex on-screen with a monster. In recent years she seems to have publicly at least come to terms with it.
• The great mathematician, John Nash, was one of the first scientists to formulate the idea of non-cooperative game theory, game scenarios where winning with the greatest advantage possible required one player to screw over the others. Nash wrote his theories on the subject throughout the 1940s and 1950s and they quickly garnered great interest, not only with other mathematicians, but also with sociologists, and even politicians and officials, who began incorporating elements of game theory in their policies and ideas of how to run of a state. But what was not known at the time was that Nash was suffering from severe paranoid schizophrenia, which he first started receiving treatment for in 1959. In his later years, an older, wiser and, not least, sane Nash would denounce parts of his theory as the result of his mental illness, stating that they were more reflective of the very dark and unhealthy views of his fellow man he held at time, than actual human behavior. Nash also noticed that the vast majority of his test subjects back in the day actually often chose cooperation over selfishness in his experiments. Back then it annoyed him greatly because he saw them as refusing to comply with his rules, but in hindsight, he saw it as a sign that our species deserves much more credit than he was willing to give it back then.
• Mexican voice actor Humberto Vélez dislike his role as the dub voice of the T-800 in the Latin American Spanish dub of Terminator 2: Judgment Day since he always felt he wasn't fit to voice someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger, as he is normally typecasted into voicing Hot-Blooded, comical or emotional roles rather than The Stoic ones Schwarzenegger normally plays.
• Dog breeder Wally Condon came to regret creating the labradoodle, calling them "crazy" and saying he "opened Pandora's box".
• Leonardo DiCaprio, not so much for any particular movie, but for his behavior as a young actor, being well known on sets for acting like a conceited punk. There was one particularly nasty incident involving Ellen Barkin that he deeply regrets.
• Will Smith has repeatedly apologized for making Wild Wild West. To this day he considers it the worst of his many, many films, and blames his part in it on an early-career desire for fame and fortune.
• Disney Channel is this towards the programs they aired before the transition from premium to basic cable in 1997.
• Pop-up ads. Everyone using the internet utterly hate them, no exception. Its creator has since apologized for introducing them.
• Uri Geller, the illusionist who forced The Pokémon Company and Nintendo to stop printing Kadabra on Pokémon cards due to the Pokémon's superficial resemblance to himself, rescinded his ban and allowed Kadabra to be used on cards again in 2020 and apologized to Pokémon fans for his actions.
• In 1988, a sixteen-year-old Alyssa Milano starred in a workout video titled Teen Steam that she now regards as the cheesiest thing ever.
  When I asked her if there's anything in the video that makes her cringe now, she answered immediately. "All of it. All of it, are you kidding?" Alyssa laughed. "But in a good way. And you have to realize that a lot of my '80s is on camera in some way, right? I went through puberty on television in the '80s. There could not be a more ugly era for fashion, and there I was for everyone to see. So, yeah, that whole time."
• People that de-convert or become an atheist/humanist may look on their life beforehand this way. Conversely, ex-atheists who converted or converted back to their prior religion can view their atheist days in such a manner also.
• From the late '00s through 2019, the news website The Huffington Post was notorious as a major purveyor of anti-vaccination and pro-"alternative medicine" rhetoric. In 2019, however, the site did an about-face, deleted all of its anti-vaccine blogs, and apologized for ever hosting them, due to a number of recent outbreaks of deadly yet preventable diseases for which there existed effective vaccines.
• Jackson Palmer, one of the original authors of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, turned against cryptocurrency in general and described the entire field as nothing but get-rich-quick scams in the middle of the crypto-craze of 2021. Specifically, he argued that cryptocurrency was a scheme to funnel money to a small handful of wealthy people at the top and help them dodge taxes and regulatory oversight, all at the expense of the retail investors they sucker in with promises of wealth. His co-founder Billy Markus agreed with his sentiment. It's worth noting that Palmer and Markus originally created Dogecoin in 2013 as a joke to make fun of what was already wild speculation in cryptocurrency at the time. Both of them were quite surprised when it not only took off as a legitimate investment vehicle, but inspired other "meme coins" that raised money on the strength of little more than a funny name.
• In 2022, the Golden Raspberry Awards announced that they were rescinding Bruce Willis' Razzie for Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in 2021 as well as Shelley Duvall's nomination for Worst Supporting Actress, and expressed shame for nominating them in the first place given their circumstances. ^note  Bruce Willis's struggles with Aphasia and Shelley Duvall's abuse by Stanley Kubrick
• A significant number of American educational institutions have renamed themselves due to them being initially named by U.S. Presidents and other historical figures who are now proven and acknowledged as having less than desirable traits. These can range from having been slave owners during the American era of slavery, being involved in White Supremacy organizations such as the KKK, being a misogynist, child molester, sexual predator, or being on record as saying or writing something that is regarded as racist, anti-semitic, anti-LGBT, or pro-Nazi (if living during that era). Numerous schools named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (both of whom are clearly on record as slaveowners) have renamed themselves, often to honor a prominent person of color. Some schools named after Andrew Jackson removed his name to acknowledge awareness of Jackson's outspoken support of expansion, even at the cost of Native American genocide. Princeton University dropped Woodrow Wilson's name from its School of Public and International Affairs. What is interesting about this example is that it was not the original name of the school which was founded in 1930 but was renamed after him in 1948 in honor of him having been an alumnus. Wilson is on record for his support of the KKK (he really loved the film The Birth of a Nation (1915)) and overall racist views.
  • In the Southern states, there is continuously growing criticism concerning earlier generations' romanticism of the Confederacy as an inherent component of Southern Culture. The Virginia based John Tyler Community College is currently as of 2022 in a transition process of changing its name to Brightpoint Community College. As with many schools and colleges in the Southern United States, it is named after noted slaveowners and/or Confederate figures. Tyler was a slaveowner and in his post presidency years, a staunch Confederate supporter. Upon his death in 1862, Jefferson Davis honored him by having Tyler's casket draped with the Confederate flag, the only American president thus far to be funeralized with something other than the American flag. Some, but not all southern states have agreed to drop the names of Confederate figures such as Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee from their school names and also remove their busts or statues from their halls and schoolgrounds.
  • In Canada, The Jean Vanier School in Regina has been renamed St. Maria Faustina School, for the Polish Roman Catholic nun who reported having visions of Christ. Vanier, a noted Catholic theologian and founder of L'Arche (an organization to support those with intellectual disabilities), was exposed as a sexual predator who victimized at least six women between 1970 and 2005.
• With increased public attention being paid to historic and current injustices against indigenous people, such as the abuse of indigenous children in the former "Indian Residential School" school system, many institutions and buildings in Canada have been renamed in the 2010s and 2020s.
  • Langevin Block, a federal government office building housing the Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council Office, was renamed to the neutral "Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council Building" due to Hector-Louis Langevin's support of residential schools.
  • Ryerson University was renamed Toronto Metropolitan University in 2022, 1 year after the 2021 discovery of up to 200 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia. Egerton Ryerson, the university's former namesake, is considered the architect of modern public education in Canada but his work was also used (after his death) to design the Indian Residential School System.
• Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care, possibly the best selling child-rearing book of all time, initially favored infant circumcision. As evidence against it mounted, Dr. Spock changed his stance: since the 1976 revision, the book makes clear that the procedure has no medical benefit. He expressed regret for ever recommending it, and called it "traumatic, painful, and of questionable value". Spock's most famous piece of advice was to put babies asleep on their fronts to avoid accidentally suffocating if they spit up, would later be revealed as highly dangerous advice that dramatically increased the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Later editions of his work have any reference to this old recommendation scrubbed from them entirely.

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