> It is usually conducted by three anonymous scientific rivals who have literally no incentive get your article through. Because of that, there are strict rules and norms about what is acceptable to say in these sorts of things (moderated by apolitical (I shouldn't even have to say that since this is science not politics) editors, plural for contentious topics). Any hint of political bias would get picked out immediately and the reviewer would get the boot. If you aren't satisfied then there is even a process to appealing to the editor's boss and so on. You're talking about like six strangers with competing interests that would all need to collude to force a political viewpoint into an article.

Apologies if I’m being overly direct, but this claim seems to assume that groups of people who are part of the same institutions or ecosystems can’t share the same cultures or biases. It’s not a question of incentives or explicit coordination - it’s a matter of a lack of diversity of thought leading to individuals making similarly biased decisions or judgment calls even without coordination. These biases can also turn up in an insidious manner - for example scrutiny being applied in a discriminatory fashion (less for studies that are agreeable and more for ones that aren’t).

> This idea and the narrative that facts and science are something that are optional and have a political bias is IMO one of the most toxic ideas in today's politics.

I’m not saying that facts or science (in the purest sense) are optional, but I certainty think they are subject to political bias. Calling something a “fact” or labeling it as “scientific” doesn’t make it so. It isn’t a toxic idea to note that the practice of science can be biased even if the broader philosophy of science isn’t supposed to be.

I think of this as more of a human reality we have to confront if pursuing the truth matters. For example take a politically sensitive topic like whether there are gender pay gaps or not. Many researchers claim there is a gap based on univariate analysis and will affix their conclusions with labels like “facts” and “science” and “data”. Multivariate studies on the same topic often say there isn’t a gender pay gap or that sufficient data doesn’t exist to clearly make a case for it. These studies, however, are often not accepted by the broader public, not amplified by news media, and aren’t socially acceptable to even quote.

We don’t have to think very hard to search much to find examples of taboo topics that are off limits in academia/research, and we don’t have to work hard to find people who are the victim of cancel culture due to their scientific pursuits or statements either (example: https://www.thecollegefix.com/far-left-scholar-activists-att...). Likewise we don’t have to work hard to find gibberish accepted by the governing processes either (example: https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). It is simply a plainly observable reality that human qualities corrupt scientific or scholarly processes that we want to have blind faith in. But the reality is we can’t afford to have blind faith in anything, not even scientific processes, and should apply scrutiny to what comes out of those processes just as we would to anything else.