This is very common and is basically one of the "ugly truth" that people get to know once they start doing academic research. If you want to live, you have to get published, and to be published, you have boots to kiss. The grant agencies and the reviewers are not going to be "open-minded" about all topics and there are things you are basically pressured into not saying even if you know that is likely how it actually is.<p>Journals and conferences would also refuse to host your studies if they find the contents to not align with "settled science", regardless of how or what the studies is actually about. And to an academic, that is potentially the end of their career once they got branded as someone too controversial to be associated with. No funding will come and no student will join. Unless they are big enough to carve out their own niche. But those are rare.