At the core of earnest arguments behind climate change denialism are legitimate studies and critiques of not only climate science, but of modern modeling and statistical analysis techniques. A core underlying meme would be "lies, damn lies, and statistics". And more technical one would be "overfitting".
Those critiques are necessary and valid and healthy, but only in the realm of professional discourse. As they leaked out they lost all context and contingency and infused our culture with an unhealthy distrust and skepticism of the legitimacy of scientific claims and techniques.
The concept of regulatory capture has been co-opted by conservatives as an excuse to oppose any sort of government regulation, even though the theory of regulatory capture doesn't make specific claims about the benefit or value or appropriateness of regulation. That concept is not as widely known popularly but still very widely abused far outside the academic realm. It's increasingly being adopted by liberals to unfairly criticize sensible cooperation between regulatory agencies and private business.
The Laffer Curve is similar that way, except that absurdly Arthur Laffer was the first person to claim (and continues to claim) the concept proves things it doesn't.
On the liberal side we can look at trigger warnings and micro-aggressions. The original academic debates that coined those terms were, IMO, quite legitimate and important. In 2017 is it really controversial to think that we might want to give some thought to people suffering from PTSD, such as when discussing rape in the presence of possibly unknown rape victims still feeling victimized. And the concept of micro-aggression is genius. It finally gave us a concrete, if limited, framework for discussing and addressing many of the subtle ways that our inherent cultural biases prejudice and harm people. But both ideas were co-opted and prematurely expanded and radically applied by an overly eager student movement.
There are countless others, too. They abound everywhere. Every editorial article floweths over with inappropriate citations to complex academic theories. It's like the popular psychology fad of the 1950s ballooned to encompass every field, and we all have the fever. We're all pseudo-scientists, now, credentialed to apply scientific theory, and defend ourselves with scientific theory, however we see fit. It's not new. Social darwinism is a classic example of the abuse of science by both scientists and laymen. It just seems more common and more pervasive.
Maybe I'm mistaken in thinking that the pace of radicalism was slower earlier last century and in times prior. Part of the reason I think that is because college attendance rates are way up, which I think implies that a large portion of society has been exposed to more radical and more highly technical ideas. And like the advent of cheap sugar, we've developed a taste for new, sweet ideas that's messing with our political chemistry. But maybe that's also a poor assumption, not to mention a poor analogy.