Scientific consensus, is a broadbased agreement about a scientific theory.
But in the context of political debates, scientific consensus for a theory has frequently been claimed without regard to whether there is any actual scientific evidence for or against it. The claim is then used by powerful political forces to completely shut down any and all dissent from select theories and to prevent alternate theories from being researched or even simply presented.
The best known liberal examples of consensus science are that of biologists favoring Darwin's Theory of evolution and the environmentalist faith in Anthropogenic global warming.
MIT Climate scientist Richard Lindzen wrote:
It was still the scientific consensus when Darwin wrote Origin of the Species in 1859 that microbes arose by spontaneous generation. [3]