[bzbarsky]

How do you square that opinion with the fact that the parts of academia that are least one-sided politically are the parts which actually do the best job of using the scientific method in practice?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/leftist-academia-demo... is a decent recent-ish article on the topic. Note the offhand comments about blatant discrimination in hiring, which might just be a relevant thing here. And from what I've seen, non-liberals in humanities departments commonly have to deal with what is pretty much the textbook definition of a hostile work environment. It just happens that political affiliation and opinion is not a protected class, so it's not possibly to do anything about it other than leaving. Which is what people do in practice.