I'm both a scientist and a libertarian, and when I am at some specific scientific gatherings it is not unusual for many academics to bash anyone and anything to the right of Lenin.
Come on. There's
zero constituency in the US, anywhere, for anything but left-centrist market liberalism.
And look. I don't know a single scientist over the age of 45 who isn't a Rush Limbaugh listener, who doesn't espouse just the most brain-dead politics despite their intelligence in any other field. I took quantitative chemistry from a PhD'd professor who took an entire afternoon to shit all over (absent any evidence, of course) the scientific consensus on global warming. The last lecture in Organic Chemistry was a thinly-veiled - and, thankfully, not on the test - defense of intelligent design and the notion of "information" as the "fourth state of matter." The campus's most vocal chemistry professor was a right-leaning libertarian who railed against all tax collection and universal health care even as he continued to cash his government paycheck and enjoyed the state's health coverage (in other words, he was a completely conventional libertarian.)
The notion that you as a right-leaning individual are somehow a solo act in a vast sea of liberals is just horseshit. Sure, conservatives tend to avoid the sciences, just as they avoid the academy in general. Why?
Because it doesn't pay for shit! Why would a conservative
work for a living when they stand to make ten times as much under wingnut welfare from the Koch brothers, the Heritage Foundation, or any one of a hundred dozen other heavily-funded "right-wing think tanks"? (There's a contradiction in terms.) Taking a huge pay cut to contribute to academia is a liberal
deal because liberals have always viewed education and research as one of the sacraments. Conservatives have done nothing but disparage the very notion of an educated elite for decades. Why on Earth would they volunteer to be part of it, when evolution and climate-change denial are out there as the path to acclaim and the big bucks?
Diversity does not apply to ideas in our modern academic world.
How did you get the idea that the scientific community is a place where error is tolerated without comment? Have you even met a scientist? Just fucking curious.