Academics certainly has a liberal bias, after all, look at where they get most of their funding. Conservative professors are being publicly shamed and chased out of their positions.
Especially since the concept of this having any vaguely modern, and by modern I mean, like, High Middle Ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#High_and_Late_Middl...) credibility is vile 19th Century and beyond propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
And you're right about the consequences of daring to do science while conservative. It's sobering to realize the career I dedicated myself to until finances prevented me from getting a bachelor's degree would not be open to me if I were to enter college today (well, I might get away with exiling myself, but that's itself is telling).
And if reality has a liberal bias, as that word is used today in the US, it sure is funny how much of it was elucidated by devout Christians.
It was Vannevar Bush who created the NSF. It was the Clinton era, IIRC, in which Republicans all of a sudden decided that funding for basic research was a partisan issue dealing with the role of government, rather than a nonpartisan matter of kicking ass and taking names.