If you use dual meanings for words. Smart people use theory to mean "fact" but politicians use it to mean "hypothesis" then they can discredit things through playing semantic games.
But maybe this is just an idiosyncrasy of evolutionary biologists, I'm not familiar enough with other fields. But then again there are all of those mathematical "theories" like group theory, number theory, set theory, game theory, and on and on. Not sure how to categorize these.
Point is we (scientists/scientific communicators) often make this hardline distinction between the meaning of "theory" and "hypothesis" but regularly break our own rule.
"Theory" has a different meaning in mathematics than in science.