I wonder if the thought occurred to them to extract the image from the top result site instead of whatever else their AI thought would be appropriate. Yes, that can also be gamed, but at least they'll be consistent.
Political Google bombing has been a thing for a long time, and while the details of how it is done and what it acheives changes, it probably will be for a very long time in the future.
Yep, and there's not much google can do about it as every metric can be gamed. Remember the "upvote this thread so that this image is the first result when searching for [politicians name]" campaigns on Reddit the past 6 years? =P
For at least an entire year, "French military victories" top result was "did you mean French military defeats"
For several weeks, Google reported the "political philosophy" of the California Republican Party to be "Nazism".
And of course there was what happened to Rick Santorum (which remained in place for at least an entire election cycle despite gaining fairly widespread attention at the time)
This sort of thing happens from time to time. The most common cause is wikipedia vandalism that gets indexed, though in this case it seems to be a very highly-ranked image search result for the image on reason.com.
It's fairly common for these things to appear, and also surprisingly common for them to last a long time after they come to light, unless a Grade AA stink is made about it. As a general rule, Google won't remove something like this directly from their index unless they "have to", and will instead add it to the training/test set for their "bad result" model and will then wait until the models take it down themselves (if they ever do).
Though if this post gets enough attention, it'll probably get fixed in a few days.