Rule By Fear: The Stochastic Terrorism Infecting BHUSD
What happens when local leaders stop trying to win arguments and instead aim to destroy lives? You get the current BHUSD leadership’s approach to dealing with their electoral opposition. Three case studies in abuse from this campaign cycle tell the story of what is at stake on November 3rd.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Case Study #1: Kim Lifschitz and BH Cares
Case Study #2: Jackie Kruger and the White Tesla
Case Study #3: The Teacher Endorsements
The Cost of Flattening Politics
Conclusion
Introduction
In 2002, mathematician Gordon Woo coined the term “stochastic terrorism” to describe a framework for quantifying the risk posed from “lone wolf” malefactors who take inspiration from larger ideological movements. Since then, the concept of stochastic terrorism has evolved and increasingly entered the mainstream lexicon to more broadly describe the process by which political actors publicly demonize, vilify, or dehumanize a target through mass media or social platforms, which statistically increases the likelihood that an audience member will commit an act of violence against the target. The goal of the actor in this scenario is not necessarily to see violence enacted against their target, but to cause the target such fear for their personal safety that they cease speaking out against the actor. They are terrorized into silence.
That is precisely what Judy Manouchehri, David Cienfuegos, Russell Stuart, and Sigalie Sabag have been doing to try and win two seats on the Beverly Hills Board of Education this November. Having effectively opted out of any sincere attempt to beat their opponents in a battle of ideas, they have instead been focusing near-exclusively on “flooding the zone” with manufactured outrage based on a random assortment of cheap smears to stunlock the opposition, intimidate their allies, and poison the electoral discourse. The following three case studies, while representing a fraction of the harm done over the course of the 2026 school board election cycle, effectively illustrate how far our city has fallen.
The psychic toll of dealing with transgressive political tactitioneering falls not just on the candidates for office, but the general voting public. We are being asked to accept a world in which the non-partisan races of Beverly Hills are approached with House of Cards-level brutality, along with all the knock-on effects that flow therefrom. The flattening of the political landscape serves to ensure that good people will not only be repelled from investing in elections, but civic participation writ large. Our next great leaders need only take one look at the battle damage being weathered by Kimberly Lifschitz and Jackie Kruger simply for representing their community and ask themselves: “Who needs that?”
Unless we can find it in ourselves to demand an end to the Board’s gutter politics, we will have no good answer to that question.
Case Study #1:
Kim Lifschitz and BH Cares
“For many school leaders, just the phrase ‘parent WhatsApp group’ is enough to trigger anxiety. We picture endless notifications, spiraling complaints and messages that should have been private texts suddenly becoming public commentary.
And yes, sometimes that happens.”
Beverly Hills is a city awash in parent WhatsApp groups. Some, like PAUSE, are an ideological big tent with non-partisan goals, and engender themselves to a measured tone. More commonly, these groups serve as communal spaces for opinionated factions of the city, and because they are usually invite-only, their discourse caters to the relevant in-group. This, by itself, is neither unusual nor surprising. When speaking amongst friends about hot-button issues, people are frequently more glib, sarcastic, or snarky than they would otherwise be in a neutral or public-facing setting. The problem is that these exchanges necessarily require context to understand. So what happens when those who come into custody of such private communications have a vested, perverse interest in stripping away context to intentionally promote misunderstanding?
You get the BH Cares fiasco.
BH Cares was created by local parent and current Board candidate Jackie Kruger in March of 2025 to organize against the district’s then-nascent conservative majority. As that majority stumbled from one controversy to the next over the course of the calendar year, the hundred-plus members of BH Cares became increasingly exasperated at the Board’s frequent habit of virtue-signaling its partisan allegiances. This hit a fever pitch in the Fall of 2025, when the Board singlehandedly plunged Beverly Hills into a national controversy over the mandatory display of Israeli flags in our schools that flooded the district with neo-Nazi threats, forcing the district superintendant to save the Board from itself.
Shockingly, not one of the three Board members responsible (Manouchehri, Sabag, or Stuart) ever offered a public apology to the Jewish community of Beverly Hills for their exercise of egregiously bad judgment. Instead, they doubled down on religious and cultural performativity: Stuart had ChatGPT whip up an mawkishly self-aggrandizing travelogue while in Israel for a wedding, whereas Sabag bizarrely recounted attending to Holocaust survivors in a tone more befitting a dogsitter. Many BH Cares members expressed revulsion at the Board’s persistent tonedeafness.
Only Kim Lifschitz got clipchimped for it.
On October 19, 2026, Manouchehri-toady David Hakimfar posted a screenshot he’d obtained from BH Cares of Lifschitz sardonicallly critiquing Stuart’s use of a kippah to create a photo op ahead of his then-upcoming second City Council run. Setting aside the embarrassment that Stuart couldn’t even be bothered to pen his own supposedly weighty self-reflection and instead outsourced the exercise to artificial intelligence, the use of religious iconography for personal and political embellishment is near-universally frowned upon, making Lifschitz’s critique entirely unremarkable. However, you’d never know that from the absolute meltdown experienced by the online commentariat.
Within minutes, Hakimfar’s smear was signal-boosted to a six-figure audience, and Lifschitz was immediately inundated with unhinged vitriol ranging from slurs to death threats as her antagonists worked overtime to widen the circle of harassment as far as possible. Notably, every effort to have a mainstream media outlet pick up the story fell flat, and understandably so: Lifschitz’s comments weren’t “antisemitic,” they were “anti-appropriating Judaism for clout,” and any news desk editor could figure that out within ten seconds of examining the pitch. Stripped of its rage-bait, the “news” at hand amounted to “someone was privately disappointed in Russell Stuart within the last calendar year.”
In other news, fork found in kitchen.
But as the hours wore on and the notification bell on Instagram kept ringing, Lifschitz felt compelled to speak out.
Lifschitz further expounded on her thoughts in the caption to her post, reproduced below.
The fact that I’m posting something like this feels ridiculous, but after receiving several media inquiries, it appears necessary that I share my response with the community.
2 days ago, a nearly year-old and entirely out-of-context screenshot from a private group chat was circulated by several Instagram accounts with six-figure follower counts who labeled the messages as an “antisemitic attack” or “tirade.”
These accusations are obviously, demonstrably false — so much so that they’d be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous.
I am a Jew, a mother, and a member of the Beverly Hills community. Even if I were none of those things, the hundreds of hateful messages and comments I’ve received as a result of this coordinated smear campaign would still be unacceptable.
What’s even more unacceptable is the fact that sitting school board members and current school board candidates are ignoring, encouraging, and even participating in the harassment of a district parent and her family.
Personally targeting the parent of a child in the district you lead (or hope to lead) to the point that she receives death threats is disqualifying.
If any school board trustees and/or candidates would like to disavow this behavior, I’m sure the community would appreciate hearing from you. Otherwise, your silence speaks volumes.
Enough.
But to the Board, the fact that Lifschitz was still standing definitionally meant that it was not enough. Their stochastic terror had failed to achieve its goal. She was defiant. Even worse, she had directly called out their inculpatory misconduct. They were in a pickle.
Clearly, it was time to quadruple down.
On October 22, 2026, Stuart ran an attack piece inexplicably suggesting that, by criticizing Sabag’s patronizing treatment of Holocaust survivors (i.e., “talking about [them] like she collected the most Pokemon”), Lifschitz was actually criticizing the survivors themselves. Obviously, to believe this framing requires a level of head injury normally reserved for Fred Flintstone’s alter egos. More notable were the deliberate choices Stuart made to amplify the antisemitism angle against Lifschitz, which included using AI editing to obscure her Star of David necklace.
The same image of Lifschitz was reused across two different “articles” in the Beverly Hills Standard, both featuring her wearing a Star of David necklace. When Stuart needed people to believe Lifschitz is antisemitic, he had the necklace’s star-shape flattened into a circle.
This tactic, intended to dehumanize Lifschitz, is apace with the Board majority’s general penchant for using AI to distort the visages of their opponents across all of their advertising, perhaps seen most infamously in this flyer for one of Manouchehri and Cienfuegos’ ballot chasing events. While Cienfuegos and Manouchehri are airbrushed to within an inch of their lives — something Cienfuegos in particular loves to do even when it practically changes his running mate’s ethnicity — Lifschitz was clothing-swapped in from a candid photo that was secretly taken by Sabag from the dais of a Board meeting, whereas Kruger was deep-fried so severely as to been rendered virtually unrecognizable. (It is very important to the Board majority that their opponents be seen as ugly on every level, since it weakens the mental barriers that would otherwise potentially inhibit their supporters from engaging in the desired levels of harassment these smear campaigns are intended to trigger.)
Lifschitz, seeing yet another wave of harassment and attempted amplification underway, made quick work of Stuart and Sabag’s nonsense.
But to the Board’s supporters, none of this matters. They will continue to defame Lifschitz as an antisemite irrespective of the facts simply because it’s a convenient way to activate people’s reflexive tribalism and muddle the signal-to-noise ratio of election discourse. They want Lifschitz to feel under constant threat of reprisal for beliefs that she does not hold because her safety is less important than their power.
That is stochastic terrorism in action. And Lifschitz is far from the only one experiencing it.
Case Study #2:
Jackie Kruger and the White Tesla
When we last left David Cienfuegos, he had just been hit with a civil restraining order for having the colossally poor judgment to stalk, doxx, and defame Jackie Kruger’s minor child, which he claims to have done with “no animosity.” Since then, Cienfuegos has been thrashing about in court to extricate himself from the legal quicksand he once so gleefully cannonballed into, with little to show for it. Far more revealing have been Kruger’s responsive filings detailing the scope of harm caused by Cienfuegos’ defamation campaign, including direct harassment by Judy Manouchehri’s son. Kruger also detailed the myriad ways in which the Board was working to amplify the defamation against her son.
Ms. Manouchehri's […] campaign account, @judyforbhusd, is tagged in the Standard's September 7 Instagram post on the sign thefts, a joint post with David Cienfuegos's campaign account, @david4bhusd. She also co-publishe[d] campaign posts with @streetpeopleofbeverlyhills, the account that reposted the video of our home (October 11 and 14, 2026).
Mr. Stuart's online newspaper, the Beverly Hills Standard, has published three articles on the sign allegations and posted each one to its Instagram account. On October 5 it reported that a video identified the white Tesla in the thefts as mine, with a matching plate. That is false. The footage of the thefts shows a white Tesla from the side with no plate visible. A separate video shows my car and my plate, and no theft at all. The same day, the Standard reported that police had identified a juvenile suspect, leaving readers to connect the two. They did: commenters on its Instagram post asked whether the candidate was disqualified or still allowed to run. That juvenile is not my son. The Standard's own articles concede that neither the footage nor the police statement establishes who owned or drove the car in the thefts. Mr. Stuart liked that Instagram post the day it went up, and on July 23, 2026 he announced the Standard's new iPhone app on his own Instagram account. His own police report says his camera showed a young man on foot, whom he did not recognize, taking two signs from his lawn. His neighbors say no signs were taken from his property, and the video he relies on shows his neighbor's property, not his. The report mentions no car. […]
Ms. Sabag has filed a police report about campaign signs that conflicts with her neighbors' accounts. On October 4, the day after Mr. Cienfuegos posted video of our home, she co-published a post with @streetpeopleofbeverlyhills attacking me over the 2025 recall effort.
Today, October 19, Mr. Stuart went further. In three comments on the Beverly Hills Courier's Instagram post about the restraining order against Mr. Cienfuegos, he told readers that police had confirmed the car in the video was used in the thefts, that police could not release the minor's name because the law prohibits it, and that I should apologize for the mistakes that had been made. He added that children must learn that whoever makes the problem has to deal with the consequences. In context, no reader could miss whom he meant. He insisted his comments did not bring up any minor children, then in his next comment invoked the minor police cannot name. None of it is true. No police statement identifies my car as the car in the thefts, the Standard's own article says the police statement does not establish who owned or drove that car, and the juvenile police identified is not my son. In the same thread, other commenters stated flatly that my son stole the signs.
The man who started this accusation has admitted under oath that he cannot support it. On October 12, 2026, Mr. Cienfuegos signed a declaration under penalty of perjury asking the Superior Court for a restraining order against my son. In it he concedes that ownership of the car "did not establish who had been driving it," that he has "no direct proof" of who was driving or that I was involved, and that he saw my son for the first time on October 5, two days after he posted the video of our home. The eight police reports he attached all describe petty theft of yard signs valued at about $7 each. None mentions a Tesla or a license plate, and the only two with video describe two different-looking people on foot.
Kruger’s account of district leadership incapable of admitting to blatant mistakes, even as it endangers the welfare of a child in their trusteeship, is nothing short of damning and leaves us at BHUSD Watch with little more to add. For the Board to defend its reckless amplification of baseless accusations with little more than dissembling and prevarication demonstrates just how committed they are to terrorizing their critics.
Case Study #3:
The Teacher Endorsements
For those laboring under the misapprehension that one must be an official candidate in the race to be targeted for harassment by Team Judy and David, you must not know any of the individuals who have endorsed or otherwise publicly supported Team Kim and Jackie. Much of this harassment has taken place behind the scenes, depriving us at BHUSD Watch of the ability to provide our usual receipts without betraying confidences. However, our tip line has overflowed with anecdotes — everything from ethnocentric threats (“if you support Kim and Jackie, I’ll make sure the Persian community never does business with you again”) to wholesale fabrications (“Kim and Jackie want to trans your kids”).
Sometimes, however, it’s just garden-variety bullying. Case in point: the teachers’ endorsement.
Many BHUSD educators felt betrayed by their union’s refusal to endorse Lifschitz and Kruger due to pressure exerted against its leadership by Manouchehri. In response, 66 of them collaborated on a group endorsement letter that went live October 21, 2026. These names were collected and confirmed through a public Change.org petition, leaving no opportunity for errant inclusion — however, the moment the letter went live, Board supporters began harassing individual signatories of the letter at levels so intense that a few were reportedly pressured into privately claiming they never agreed to be on the letter. Notably, no teachers have publicly claimed they were mistakenly included in spite of the organizing petition’s corroboration. Nevertheless, the mere suggestion has further chummed the waters for the worst political fabulists.
This has been a consistent trend for any electoral developments adverse to Manouchehri and Cienfuegos: If you can’t earn support, pressure and threaten the other side out of theirs. If you can’t inspire confidence, inspire fear. If you can’t poke holes in your opponents’ platform, poke holes in their personal lives. Interrogate their extended network. Dig around in their trash cans. Stalk their children. Just make stuff up.
After all, they’re demons. Terrorize away.
The Cost of Flattening Politics
On October 20, 2026, reporting came out that Vivek Ramaswamy, the 2026 Republican gubernatorial candidate for Ohio, was dumping $4 million into a last-minute political ad campaign against his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, featuring Acton’s mother calling her a liar.
What the ad omitted was that Acton had been raped by her mother’s husband at the age of 12, and Acton’s mother chose to protect her daughter’s rapist instead of her daughter. They’ve been estranged ever since.
Most normal people, including many Republicans, were disgusted by Ramaswamy’s tactics.
Donald Trump calls those people wimps. This is politics, baby. Double down. The enemy always deserves the abuse.
The regime currently in charge of BHUSD consists of Trump acolytes, and they are running his playbook. But scorching the earth looks different when you all share the same five-mile patch of land. If this were normal or acceptable, Manouchehri would not have bled literally every single endorsement that carried her to her first victory four years ago. If this were normal or acceptable, pillars of our community would not be racing to endorse Lifschitz and Kruger after the myriad smear campaigns that supposedly served to expose them as unqualified for office.
With each passing day, a consensus is forming: This is not okay. This cannot be who we are.
This is not how you win an election. This is how you ruin a life.
We are better than stochastic terror. We are better than victory at all costs.
We are better than Judy Manouchehri and David Cienfuegos.
Conclusion
On November 3rd, Beverly Hills will decide more than just who occupies two seats on the Board of Education for the next four years. It will decide whether it is acceptable for us to terrorize our neighbors in pursuit of political vindication. It will decide whether this year’s race becomes the template upon which all future races are built. We have a chance—quite possibly our last chance—to slam Pandora’s Box shut.
We encourage you to think hard about what world you want to be living in on November 4th.