Not an American, but I figure in some ways the situation is similar here.
I think it's certainly not true that these things are at an 'all time high'. Quite the contrary; at least on the racism. It used to be expected that you'd hate certain groups; racism was so ingrained that it wasn't even considered racism; it was just 'the way things are'. Now, we're expected to actually think about it, and think about it we do; as a result, we're far more aware of it when it happens. On the flip-side, the more things develop along progressive paths, the more intense the reactionary response to it. When you have a relatively small group of people loudly yelling batshit crazy things, it's easy to imagine that those people represent some sort of majority or serious trend; but if we were to look at the real numbers, the picture would probably look a lot less dire.
As for the science issue; I think this one can be blamed on the media to a large degree. The media loves to pick up stories about science they can make sound exciting (a physicist describing their work on the nature of time gets twisted around to imply that we're just years from building a timemachine!) or dumb (look at these stupid scientists wasting our money figuring out water is wet!); the former kind of story creates disappointment with science (dude, where's my flying car?), the latter induces anger. Plus, the frontiers of science deal with some seriously complex stuff, and unless you have a science education yourself, you're probably not going to be able to understand the research the way it's meant to be understood. In some people, this justifies conspiracy thinking, cause surely they must be hiding something by using all that mumbo-jumbo!
But hey, people have been disappointed, angry and distrustful of science since its very beginnings. It's just that nowadays any idiot with an opinion can voice it for everyone to hear. Used to be that only the people who'd happened to walk past their corner soapbox would be bothered by them.
