Many contrarian views grow long time in small small minded groups or even withing one individual. They have high internal consistency and logic. When exposed to outsiders, they usually spot some obvious errors immediately.
Did Larry Summers receive backlash, consequences and pressure from academia (his peers) like Strumia or just from from social media and public.
Public backlash is to be expected in the time of moral panic.
I've met completely incompetent programmers who had advanced degrees and tons of experience (not 60% of the field, mind you, but enough to realise it does happen). The field of science is not immune to this. I remember my brother telling me a frightening story of going to a first year science lecture and the professor saying that correlation implies causation. He put up his hand and said, "You mean does not imply causation, don't you?" The professor said that, no, if it's correlated it means that one caused the other. How can you get a PhD in science and also manage to land a job at a university (reasonably well respected at that) and be so confused at such a basic level? It happens, though.
Sometimes even very smart and capable people have huge blind spots in the way that they think. Again, I've worked with a number of programmers who were extremely talented and intelligent but were unable to program anything that didn't turn into a massive ball of spaghetti. They could barely keep it working (due to their intelligence and talent), and nobody else even had a chance. This is sucking at your job, even though you have the mental hardware and skills to do a good job. It happens -- everywhere. In all walks of life. I remember the case of the airline pilot who got sick of waiting for air traffic control to give him the OK to take off. He decided to go anyway and killed hundreds of people including himself. Apparently he was a very experienced and skilled pilot.
What you are seeing is not a pattern that involves scientists. What you are seeing is a pattern that involves people who are self-deluded and over confident. I mean we could put "Actor" in for "Scientist" in your points and it would read just as well. Yes, the field of science is not immune to this kind of problem.
I think the main thing is that if an actor says something stupid we think, "Oh they are just an actor". If a scientist says something stupid, we tend to think that maybe they should be doing better. A scientist's job is to think critically, build models and test them objectively against the data. When a scientist seems incapable of doing this basic task, maybe we need to wonder if they are actually able to do their job well -- because lot's of people are crap at their jobs. Even scientists.
There is a pattern that is repeating:
1. Scientist has a political opinion on difficult politically volatile issue that is outside his field.
2. Scientist finds some supporting evidence.
3. Scientist comes out with agenda, evidence and overly confident conclusion.
4. Backlash
5. Scientist claims that he is discriminated. He thinks that just because he had some hard data, his presentation was just cold neutral science.
6. Others find easily some evidence that explains his theories away (Women leaving the field in disproportionately higher rates in this case).