You're conflating "hostility towards science", which doesn't really make sense as a concept and isn't actually widespread at all (unless you count New Age woo t

You're conflating "hostility towards science", which doesn't really make sense as a concept and isn't actually widespread at all (unless you count New Age woo type stuff), with "hostility towards specific scientific institutions and their staff" which can make sense for the same reason hostility to any institution or social arrangement can make sense. Sometimes when you find yourself thinking, maybe lots of people around me are just really, really stupid, it helps to look at analogous situations from other times or places. Do things look different then? Consider the example of Lysenkoism. It was a strain of thought in the USSR in the 1930s mostly related to biology and agriculture, presented as scientific. And in some ways it was - he made apparently scientific sounding claims about experiments he (claimed he) did around selective breeding, cross breeding of plants etc. But it wasn't actually true and crop yields declined. Unfortunately for ordinary Russians, Lysenkoism became the official biology of the state and all opposition was suppressed. Any scientists who opposed it were censored and "cancelled" (jailed). In its place the media published stories claiming it had led to great harvests in Siberia, and that anyone who opposed it was guilty of "mysticism, obscurantism and backwardness". Would it have been right for a Russian who knew the truth to threaten Lysenko? Perhaps it's not worth discussing - that would lead to "was it ethical to try and assassinate Hitler" type territory. But at the very least a rejection of it would have been understandable and rational, even though at the time - to someone in the grip of state propaganda - attacks on Lysenko would have seemed like irrational attacks on science itself. Now you're going to be tempted to argue that people who attacked Soviet biologists and people who attack "COVID scientists" are totally different because obviously COVID science is True, and Soviet agronomy was Not True and therefore there's nothing to learn from it. But we are in the same situation today that the Russians were. Although western media isn't technically state controlled, it might as well be. The media is controlled by people who are extremely loyal to the prevailing state ideology and narrative, to the point that the absurd extremes of media propaganda routinely become memes (let's go brandon!). From within the system it can be hard to tell who is really right, and you should think twice then three times before assuming that you're the one who's got it all figured out.