The Church is not a country and never was? And Galileo was forced to recant then spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Church defeated him.

> Science is meritocratic in the sense that even the small guy has a chance of fighting the machine as eventually things need to be defended on their technical merits

Nobody who has followed the shenanigans of scientific institutions in the last decade believes this anymore, sorry. Modern science consists of credentialed charlatans plying entirely fraudulent claims and those being accepted, over and over, with no end in sight, and everyone who tries to point out the problems in The Science end up being cancelled or burning out because the employers of said charlatans are the modern Church. They simply do not care if their people tell the truth or not.