Your comment needs a little more nuance. Funding is part of the overall practice of science, and research cannot happen in a vacuum. Facts are not political.

Your comment needs a little more nuance. Funding is part of the overall practice of science, and research cannot happen in a vacuum. Facts are not political. Science involves people coming up with research plans, getting funding, conducting the research, and reporting results. Even though facts are not political, many important scientific findings can be debated. Very little of our body of knowledge is verifiable by the general population. You can verify gravitational acceleration and atmospheric drag by self experimentation, but have you ever tried to verify how many electrons are in the outer shell of a particular element? We teach the periodic table of elements to high schoolers as fact, but if a student claims that titanium has eight electrons in its outer shell most chemistry teachers are going to have a hard time proving otherwise. This lack of verifiability leaves a bunch of room for political maneuvering. Add in the fact that scientists are still human, and are just as morally corrupt as other humans. Being a scientist doesn't come with a magic aura of justice and credibility. Falsification of data in the hopes of getting published tarnishes the reputation of scientists worldwide- who is to say that others aren't also falsifying their data to favor their funding source? If a scientist can be doubted then their findings can be debated, which politicians will certainly do when it suits them. You have to get your results published, or else you won't get funded for future research, and a group of editors controls the access to the important journals in each field. Those editors usually have a common political bias, as did most researcher's professors, because once a bias is established in a field it tends to reinforce itself. So I'll reword your comment to be "the practice of science is political, but facts are not." Unfortunately so little of our life falls to the realm of verifiable facts.