By S.A. McCarthy

Whistleblowers are exposing that tech giant Google’s internal governing policies are completely dominated by woke ideology. When Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) program Gemini began generating images last month of the Founding Fathers as black men and popes as women, former Google Ventures partner Shaun Maguire said he was “not shocked at all,” according to a report from The Free Press. Maguire explained, “Google Gemini’s failures revealed how broken Google’s culture is in such a visually obvious way to the world. But what happened was not a one-off incident. It was a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been taking over the company for years.”

The Free Press spoke to numerous former Google employees who all reported that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) “is part of every single thing” at Google. One unnamed former Google Brain researcher said that the woke Gemini generations were not an accident. “The model is just a reflection of the people who trained it. It’s just a series of decisions that humans have made.” He explained that Google executives became worried after an incident in 2015 when the AI running Google Photos mislabeled images of black people as “gorillas.” But the unnamed researcher warned that the company overcorrected and “now it becomes biased in a totally different direction.”

David Kiferbaum, a former Google business manager, reported that he was pressured to increase diversity hires and to seek out “diverse candidates,” which he says he interpreted to mean “a non-white, a non-hetero[sexual]” candidate. “I was like, ‘Whoa,’” he said. “‘I can’t believe this person is saying this out loud.’” An unnamed former lawyer with Google reported that he was told to increase “personal DEI goals,” like recruiting at minority job fairs or joining minority affinity clubs. He said, “I told my manager, ‘Listen, I think this is bulls–t — this isn’t relevant to my role at all.” His manager agreed with him but “wasn’t going to ruffle feathers” since he wanted a promotion.

Maguire recounted that after Google software engineer James Damore was fired for questioning the wisdom of Google’s DEI commitment, the tech giant “became even more radical.” He explained, “Damore’s firing emboldened them to push a more open ideological agenda.” Maguire also discussed how DEI initiatives, especially in the hiring process, ramped up after Damore was sacked, resulting in “unreasonable demands.”

“The demands included the insistence that senior leaders hire at least two additional female general partners — which is the senior role I was promised I’d get once I reached three years with the company,” Maguire recalled. “One of those hires, the group demanded, needed to happen within six months. If leadership refused, about a quarter of the firm, or 20 people out of the 80 employees at Google Ventures, threatened to quit.” While Maguire supported hiring a female partner, he warned that purring a time limit on the decision would result in “lowering standards.” He said, “Hiring general partners into a venture firm is a very hard, laborious process, because the positions are so senior and require finding the right fit. The hiring process normally takes anywhere between one to two years.”

Eventually, Maguire recounted, Google Ventures hired a female general partner “who was really smart but who wasn’t qualified for the job.” He explained, “Because of her lack of experience, she was never treated on the same level as the other general partners, which I believe was ultimately unfair to her.” He also described how Google Ventures stopped hiring experienced investors and instead started inundating the workforce with “young people from minority backgrounds … with virtually no investment experience whatsoever.” He added that a 25-year-old black woman was promoted to his position (investment partner) even though she “had not yet made a single investment decision in her entire career.”

Maguire decided to quit Google after he was passed over for a promotion. He said that working at Google was “like being in an authoritarian country where only certain views and people were accepted.” He added that he felt unable to commend the policies of then-President Donald Trump and donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign “because I knew it would be public and knew it would get me points inside Google and insulate me when I inevitably got in trouble for doing something unintentionally wrong.” Maguire recounted that his Google Ventures CEO told him he would not be receiving a promotion despite being “one of the highest performing people at the company,” because the CEO had a diversity “quota” to fill.

Maguire began searching for a new job. He said, “When firms would ask me why I wanted to leave Google, I would be brutally honest. I’d say, 'Because Google is f—ing woke. It’s not a meritocracy. And I want to work somewhere with a performance culture.’”

Google has long been known as a supporter of left-wing causes and ideologies, but this latest report comes in the midst of increased scrutiny over how DEI policies impact major companies that everyday Americans rely upon. For example, aircraft manufacturers like Boeing have faced backlash lately over their DEI initiatives, which have reportedly been linked to a series of airplane malfunctions and failures, endangering lives. After Google received backlash for its incessantly woke Gemini images, it temporarily paused the program but had already lost $90 billion in value.

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.