Also: In what political landscape will science being political be a bad thing? If you have harmony in your political landscape with the biggest differences between your political parties being about topics like taxes, whether privatization is good and how much to spend on social issues — given such an environment wouldn't it be the case that nobody cared if science was political?

So if science does what it always does (trying to find truth in hard questions that matter) and suddenly someone starts complaining about it being "political", one should also consider that it might not be science that changed, but the relationship political actors have with the truth.

Example: If you are the head of the flat-earth party any science reporting the earth as sphere-like would seem political (or even criminal) to you. But this would have nothing to do with science — and all to do with the mismatch between your believes and the reality out there.