1. Much of US policy toward science is backlash to Covid vaccinations. Being anti-Science is a way of preventing Science from inflicting itself on the populace again in the future.
2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.
It's been there so much longer, even Carl Sagan talked about it, and its inherently tied to religion.
We just did a 30 year run of “religious people are dumb and holding bus back” and it didn’t start a science boom and just made people more unhappy and disaffected.
And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.
Do you imply that last 30 years lacked significant science progress? Even if I ignore the tech ones (simpler to associate with the US), there were quite some impressive progress I heard of in other fields (in which US was significantly involved).
When did this ever happen?
After your formative years when you were done adopting new ideas.