Russell Stuart Is Scamming BHUSD
Introduction
When BHUSD Board of Education trustee Russell Stuart opened up his Instagram app on September 25, 2025, he had a choice to make.
Two weeks prior, Stuart had been personally served with a cease-and-desist letter over multiple alleged violations of California Government Code § 54954.3, and the resultant press coverage clearly had him bothered. After all, he and fellow complicit Board members stood accused of repeatedly silencing the voices of concerned BHUSD parents by refusing to let them comment on critical changes to major agenda items passed by the Board, including resolutions responsible for endangering Jewish students, marginalizing LGBTQ students, and turning Beverly Hills into a national laughingstock. In fact, Stuart was under deadline to publicly disavow those bad practices or face a potential lawsuit under the Brown Act. How would he respond?
In an ideal world, Stuart would rise to the occasion by being contrite and constructive. He could credibly plead ignorance of his obligations under the Brown Act - after all, he had publicly blown off prior opportunities to educate himself on the law. He could also recognize that, for all its pomp and circumstance, the cease-and-desist letter’s demands were rather modest. If the Board felt compelled to significantly mark up agenda items after introducing them, all it had to do was simply table the votes on those items until the next scheduled Board meeting. That way, the public could comment on the changes and the Board could better reflect on their propriety before committing to the new language. Who could possibly object to that?
Russell Stuart could, and did, because he saw being accused of violating the law as a badge of honor.
Russell Stuart suggests his commitment to violating parents’ rights is part of an ongoing fight against the “crooked establishment” in a video posted to Instagram on September 25, 2025.
Indeed, Stuart left no doubt as to how he felt when he posted a video bizarrely comparing himself to the disgraced ex-CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick. Stuart was apparently enamored with how Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrayed Kalanick defiantly rejecting a cease-and-desist letter in an episode of 2022’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. Stuart green-screened himself wordlessly reacting to the monologue, gesticulating in agreement while Gordon-Levitt characterized the letter as a “truncheon of the crooked establishment” and a “sign of validation” that its recipients were not merely rulebreakers, but “disruptors.”
Stuart’s post was inexplicable for multiple reasons. Beyond the ill-considered nature of loudly confirming that he stood by his “disruptive” conduct (thereby providing fantastic evidence of intended future Brown Act violations under California Government Code § 54960), Stuart’s comparison makes no sense. In Super Pumped, Kalanick is leading a private company and railing against laws protecting his business rivals from competition to the detriment of consumers. Here, Stuart is the government, and he is railing against the enforcement of laws that prevent him from violating the rights of his own constituents.
Stuart makes no effort to explain how BHUSD parents are “the establishment” or what is laudable about silencing them in service of rushing out half-baked work product. His point is purely superficial: “I am a beleaguered maverick railing against a corrupt Deep State of nitpickers. If people are accusing me of doing bad things, it only indicates that I am actually doing good things.” This reflexive contrarianism, a recurring pattern with Stuart, is antithetical to the nonpartisan nature of a trustee’s role. It reflects little more than juvenile stubbornness and commitment to conflict as a benchmark for satisfactory job performance.
Unfortunately, it is also fully consistent with the man Stuart has proven himself to be: Someone who is more interested in self-valorizing than self-reflecting and would rather create a public persona than do public good. Someone who sees his government position as a path to self-enrichment, trading on his title to elevate his voice as a pundit and use our community as a test kitchen for his schemes.
The case against Stuart is a multifaceted one, and it can be tempting to get bogged down in the salacious details of his many scandals and outrages rather than the salient ones. However, the log line is simple: Stuart’s conduct betrays a fundamental disinterest in doing the actual work of the Board.
Stuart’s digital footprint makes it manifestly obvious that he wants to be a social media influencer and political talking head on conservative cable news above all else, and he has surrounded himself with a noxious circle of far-right personalities to set himself up for that trajectory. In the meantime, he is scamming BHUSD for clout and connections, manufacturing controversies that boost his own culture warrior profile to the detriment of the vulnerable children he is charged with safeguarding.
In short, the misalignment of Stuart’s personal goals and public obligations make him uniquely unqualified for government service of any kind. He has squandered every opportunity offered to conduct himself with grace, dignity, poise, or impartiality. Beverly Hills deserves better than a representative who looks down at his constituents with scorn and contempt while lining his own pockets to their detriment.
Who is Russell Stuart?
“When people show you who they are, believe them.”
Russell Stuart vs. Himself
There are two versions of Russell Stuart.
The first version is who Stuart purports to be on his campaign website and in puff profile pieces — a friendly “conservative centrist” with a background in private security whose foremost concern is the safety and success of BHUSD students. This version of Stuart holds innocuous beliefs, such as “doing the right thing,” putting constituents first, striving for high standards, and working with all stakeholders. He also maintains friendships with both Jewish and gay people.
The above is, of course, pablum. Nobody campaigns on doing the wrong things, putting constituents last, striving for low standards, or excluding stakeholders. This version of Stuart is the equivalent of a stock photo that comes bundled with a retail picture frame: calculated to be intentionally inoffensive and utterly vacuous.
The second version of Russell Stuart is the one he himself expresses, most often on social media, when he thinks he is in friendly territory and not being critically observed. This version is many things, but none worthy of praise.
Stuart routinely celebrates, fantasizes over, and jokes about extrajudicial violence against those he doesn’t care for politically. He bemoans that you can’t run over protestors with your car and apparently finds the suggestion that white supremacist rallies and attempted insurrections are bad things to be hilarious.
Stuart has promoted the rabidly antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, reposting a noxious pro-GRT rant about the dilution of white communities by infamous rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate that repeatedly included Jewish stars in the captions to remove any ambiguity as to which group was being blamed for impending civilizational collapse. (He has also followed and boosted content from other well-known GRT adherents such as Eva Vlaardingberbrock.)
In addition to his GRT promotion, Stuart’s social media presence is virulently transphobic, frequently misogynistic, Islamophobic, and comically racist. He dabbles in conspiracy, lies brazenly, and is unapologetically tribalistic.
Whether one agrees with Stuart’s opinions or not, he is demonstrably not a uniting or centrist figure. He is deliberately incendiary, polarizing, and sits comfortably on the far-right of the political spectrum. He delights in recreational cruelty towards those he looks down upon, only to turn around and claim to love everyone. The disingenuousness is not only palpable, but dangerous for anyone lulled into believing the first version of Stuart will not come after them.
He can, and he does.
Russell Stuart vs. The Community
While Stuart’s antipathy is most often aimed at whatever low-hanging mainstream political or cultural fodder has been piped into his social media feeds on any given day, he has no qualms about shopping locally for his targets. As such, Stuart can frequently be found attacking BHUSD parents (both directly and indirectly) for perceived sleights against him. These hissy fits have a have a fairly consistent and predictable arc to them:
First, Stuart will post a saucy hot take to social media, such as suggesting that BHUSD should take a page from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (with Stuart on record as an ardent Musk stan no matter how many r-slurs he drops). These takes, as one might expect, rarely age well.
Second, as criticism of his hot take trickles in, Stuart will begin taking indirect shots at his detractors, such as by passive-aggressively “liking” the negative comments he received from community members (while otherwise sitting back and allowing allies to attack parents on his behalf).
Third, as the backlash against him swells, Stuart will use the next scheduled Board meeting to complain about how his righteous intentions were misunderstood, issue a “sorry you were offended” non-apology, and post the diatribe to social media as both a victory lap and middle finger to the community.
These rinse-and-repeat skirmishes serve a number of purposes, but the most enduring is that they provide a steady stream of virtue signals to Stuart’s base, which similarly relishes antagonizing his critics. Stuart’s comment sections serve as a reliable watering hole for sycophants to laud Stuart while using personal information about parents to harass and intimidate them. Sometimes those attack dogs are subsequently given a seat at the table with Stuart and the rest of the Board.
Stuart’s assaults on the BHUSD community have noticeably escalated in recent weeks, seemingly fueled by his own radicalization in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Stuart spent days fixated on the “disgusting sub-humans” who were “gloating and mocking” Kirk’s death online, which Stuart claimed (without evidence) included “countless people” in Beverly Hills. Stuart’s commentariat used this as a jumping-off point to accuse Stuart’s detractors of posing a similar danger to his life, likening them to an “unhinged” “mob” that has “caused ugliness to invade our village” of Beverly Hills.
The siege mentality gripping Stuart and his community has provided them with a convenient excuse to project their worst fantasies upon anyone who uses BHUSD’s public comment periods to voice concern over Stuart’s freewheeling invective. Not even Stuart’s fellow Board members are safe from reproach. Indeed, after one Stuart loyalist (an anonymous private account going by “oppo.research”) proved their bona fides in his comments by trashing two unaligned trustees with ageist and homophobic insults (while also taking childish sideswipes at BHUSD parents), Stuart rewarded them with a follow.
Stuart’s mockery arguably hit a crescendo after the Board’s September 30, 2025 meeting, wherein Stuart was grilled over his effort to quietly bilk BHUSD for thousands of dollars to attend a media networking conference in New York. Stuart’s explanation — that he needed to supervise two other employees as they shop for KBEV equipment — made zero sense, as he was already on record that hundreds of local A/V retailers could provide this equipment. It also constituted a direct violation of Board Bylaws 9005 and 9200, which prohibit Stuart from performing staff or administrative duties. The grilling in question, written by the parent of a disabled BHUSD student, calculated how many necessary-yet-unprovided PPE products, such as gloves and sanitizing wipes, could be delivered to BHUSD’s classrooms for the cost of financing Stuart’s sightseeing tour.
The very next day, after his trip was approved by the Board over public objection, Stuart taunted the parent of the disabled child who spoke up by filming himself smugly eating a chicken sandwich to the tune of the Chicken Dance, then uploading it to social media with the caption “Here’s me contemplating how many N95 masks I could’ve purchased if I didn’t buy this succulent spicy chicken sandwich… I guess we’ll never know.”
Russell Stuart taunts the parent of a disabled BHUSD student for suggesting that the thousands of taxpayer dollars he planned to spend on a media networking event would be better used to provide critical PPE for classrooms.
This is not the behavior of an upstanding member of the community. It is the behavior of a thin-skinned, malicious, and spiteful bully. (It is also a dog-whistle to the fact that Stuart is an anti-masker, which he bent over backwards to telegraph in this instance, since masks were nowhere on the list of PPE suggested to the Board.)
The fact that Stuart has been able to comfortably lead his ideological double life for this long is a byproduct of his current relative obscurity. Candidates for local office receive a fraction of the scrutiny applied to their counterparts at the state and federal levels, and Stuart has benefitted from that lack of investigatory rigor. Voters, in turn, are usually forced to take local candidates at their word unless they, or others on their behalf, dedicate the time to digging through what may be years of digital detritus to painstakingly reconstruct the truth. As we have seen, that truth can be profoundly revealing.
The same goes for understanding Stuart’s ideological cohorts, without whom Stuart would likely not be in the position of influence he currently occupies, and who extend well beyond his social media gadflies. Over the last few years, an ad hoc network of far-right agitators has sprung up within and around Beverly Hills, and Stuart has sought to strike alliances with each and every one of them to fuel his own ambitions. He has attended their events, spoken at their rallies, reposted their online content, and amplified their overall platforms, no matter how hateful their rhetoric proves to be. By tapping into his allies’ bases of support, Stuart has attempted to shore up his own, and his continued ascent in political life now principally relies on nobody looking too closely at what he has so gleefully cosigned in pursuit of higher office.
Let’s take that too-close look now, shall we?
Meet Russell’s Squad
“A man is known by the company he keeps.”
On November 12, 2024, one week after his election to the BHUSD Board, Stuart publicly thanked three particular individuals instrumental to facilitating his victory: “@lady_with_a_brain” (Elizabeth Barcohana), “@cali.maga.barbie” (April Silverman), and “@susancollinsla” (Susan Collins).
Russell Stuart thanks Elizabeth Barcohana, April Silverman, and Susan Collins for helping him win his BHUSD seat.
Each had heavily promoted Stuart’s candidacy as part of MAGA-aligned voter guides pushed to their combined six-figure following, and Stuart was only too happy to show them some love in return.
Stuart’s alliances with these individuals are notable in that they contextualize exactly where Stuart exists within the Overton window. He gained their trust by finding common cause with their political positions, and he is incentivized to continue pushing those positions to stay in his benefactors’ good graces. More importantly, because these individuals have made political activism their principal stock and trade, they are willing to shout what Stuart is currently only willing to whisper.
Elizabeth Barcohana
Elizabeth Barcohana (who recently revealed herself to be @lady_with_a_brain after several years of anonymously running the account), for example, gave up being a full-time attorney to become a full-time MAGA apparatchik. This career change has afforded Barcohana plenty of free time to pursue her goal of “Making CA Red Again,” which apparently calls for peddling outlandish far-right conspiracy theories, engaging in casual racism, and promoting transphobia with Stuart’s express approval. She believes public schools are “Marxist activist factories” and has made it her mission to publicly undermine any Beverly Hills parents, students, or teachers who speak out against discrimination within BHUSD. (Barcohana also shares Stuart’s love for Elon Musk and will happily tank for him at any given opportunity, having already adopted his slur of choice for her adversaries.)
To be clear, Stuart and Barcohana are far from casual acquaintances. Barcohana attended and promoted Stuart’s BHUSD campaign kickoff, leading Stuart to promote and attend a right-wing voter registration workshop hosted by Barcohana and aimed at students. (Query how Stuart would feel if a Board member scored an endorsement from a local Democratic Socialists of America chapter and subsequently encouraged BHUSD students to attend one of their sponsored political organizing events.)
April Silverman
April Silverman styles herself as a “Political & Pop Culture Commentator” and “MAGA Conservative giving patriots a voice” who is “Dropping Daily Truth bomb reels straight from Los Angeles” while “Fighting for a clean & safe city again.” In practice, her “truth bombs” are little more than white grievance, racist taunts, and xenophobic fever dreams wrapped in garish pink “graphic design is my passion” packaging. Her best idea for “a clean & safe city” appears to be encouraging Korean residents of Los Angeles to take to their rooftops with guns and kill protestors. While the “patriots” to whom April is giving a voice aren’t explicitly named, they presumably appreciate deep-fried memes calling non-binary individuals “ugly people with no personality skills” and think riding around Los Angeles looking for ICE raids at car washes and Home Depot stores to laugh at is the next great American pastime.
Needless to say, Silverman is followed by both Stuart and Barcohana and speaks their love language.
Susan Collins
Susan Collins was described in 2024 by Knock LA as “a fringe right-wing troll so politically toxic” that, during her run for California State Senate that year, “she ha[d] only two total endorsements to speak of, perhaps because she is very publicly racist and bigoted on social media.” Collins exemplifies Stuart’s talent for tapping into the single issue voter community for support, with Collins’ issue happening to be obsessive Islamophobia and xenophobia. In that sense, Collins shares Stuart’s apparent enthusiasm for Great Replacement Theory, but with a Muslim twist. Sometimes Collins will express her Islamophobia in novel ways, such as through hilarious memes or ableism. None of it seems to phase Stuart, who gladly accepted her shared endorsement of Silverman’s voter guide with Street People Media (an outfit that primarily exists to dehumanize unhoused individuals and propagate aporophobia) in addition to Collins’ own guide.
BONUS: Shiva Bagheri
Left out of Stuart’s post-election plaudits, but no less responsible for his political ascent, is one last Beverly Hills MAGA stalwart: Shiva Bagheri, a perennial also-ran political candidate who describes herself as a “Christian conservative, Constitutionalist, Mother, and Freedom activist.” In practice, she fritters away her days with a variety of dubious hobbies. In the past, you could reliably find her riding shotgun with the Proud Boys in violent demonstrations against LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools or organizing confrontational anti-mask flash mobs at various retail and grocery stores around Los Angeles during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In one particularly infamous incident, Bagheri ripped the mask off an immunocompromised patient arriving at Cedars-Sinai’s breast cancer treatment center before punching her in the chest. Bagheri later called the woman a “crisis actor” and asserted she was lying about having cancer.
Bagheri reached the summit of her political notoriety when she scored a profile in The Daily Beast, which deserves to be read in full. Highlights include: (a) Bagheri standing outside Hawthorne Elementary School screaming at BHUSD schoolchildren through a bullhorn that their parents are “raping” them with vaccines, (b) her aforementioned assault of a cancer patient, and (c) claiming she is not aware of a single person having died from COVID. Bagheri is a human run-on sentence, able to string together an endless series of rehearsed MAGA quips whenever she manages to muscle her way in front of a camera (assuming she can get close enough, as she is repelled by the Satanic nature of masked reporters.)
For our purposes, Bagheri’s true importance is her maintenance of the Beverly Hills Freedom Rally, an organization that has hosted gatherings at Beverly Hills Garden Park since 2020 to protest the conservative gripe-du-jour. Once the permitted portion of the rally ends, the group frequently marches through the Golden Triangle district of Beverly Hills, tying up traffic and yelling at people trying to have a nice dinner. It was here that, on February 24, 2024, Russell Stuart took an early stab at public speaking during his unsuccessful run for Beverly Hills City Council.
Declaring himself a longtime supporter of Bagheri’s work despite, well, everything you just read, Stuart regaled the crowd with a variety of MAGA’s Greatest Hits. He claimed America was “under assault” by immigrants coming over the border who hate Jews, engaged in some light 2020 election denialism, and railed against “DEI nonsense” in schools, saying he wanted his daughter learning “real” history instead of “changing her gender when she’s 6 months old,” which is a thing that definitely happens. In return, Bagheri proudly declared Stuart to be “the ONLY Candidate I support for Beverly Hills City Council!”
Fast forward to September 14, 2025. Stuart — now bearing his consolation prize of BHUSD trusteeship — elected to make a pilgrimage back to Beverly Hills Garden Park for Bagheri’s latest Freedom Rally iteration, billed as a vigil for Charlie Kirk. Taking the microphone, Stuart appeared to have three primary goals: (1) lend credibility to Bagheri’s event by brandishing his BHUSD credentials during his speech; (2) rehabilitate the legacy of a white supremacist who, when not trying to ritualistically humiliate college students under the guise of debate, would have forced his 10-year-old daughter to carry her rapist’s child to term; and (3) push the rally’s attendees to follow in his footsteps by smuggling their far-right beliefs into local government.
For the uninitiated, Stuart’s speech likely raised few alarm bells. Despite Kirk’s notoriety in political circles, most average citizens (and even many conservatives who only consume viral clips of Kirk’s most polished interview and debate moments) remain ignorant of his many odious beliefs. These viewers would consequently fail to clock that Stuart was, in the words of Elizabeth Spiers, doing the equivalent of eulogizing Joseph Goebbels as “a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.” But it was precisely Kirk’s talent for cloaking a vile ideology with respectable presentation that Stuart so clearly admired. More than that, Stuart visibly envied Kirk’s ability to build a lucrative empire upon that artifice. It’s something Stuart had himself been trying in vain to emulate for years.
Now, with BHUSD under his belt and a phalanx of ultraconservatives at his back, Stuart is making his move.
Clout First, Service Last
Russell Stuart has been in the content creation game for a long time.
Well before he entered the political arena, Stuart was looking to make a name for himself in Hollywood, going by the moniker of “Russell Curry aka Dangeruss.” After collecting a handful of credits, Stuart trademarked his own name in 2014 for entertainment-related services, but subsequently abandoned the mark in 2021. For the next few years, Stuart would wander in the content creation desert searching for a purpose. First, he tried to be a banal inspo-poster.
When his stock words of encouragement set against stock photography failed to resonate or achieve “Hang in there, Baby” levels of success, Stuart abandoned this venture. He then twice claimed to be imminently launching a podcast in February 2022 and January 2024, although nothing public-facing ever materialized.
Then, in April of 2024, after losing his City Council race, inspiration seemingly struck. Stuart applied for and was eventually granted a new trademark registration for his name. Gone were the generic “I want to be a star”-type descriptions of the goods and services Stuart hoped to peddle, replaced by ventures like "ongoing multimedia programs featuring content in the field of public safety, news, politics, human events, [and] current events,” as well as “motivational speaking services in the field of public safety, news, politics, social issues, current events, entertainment, personal development, and business[.]”
Stuart was going to become the Tony Robbins of Security in Beverly Hills, and BHUSD was going to help get him there.
Having plowed the remaining cash from his City Council campaign into his BHUSD campaign, Stuart began conditioning the public to seek comfort in his security credentials. He brandished his expertise on cable news and stoically cosplayed for his audience. He also boosted the visibility of any local crime reports that crossed his desk, though his dedication to accuracy and tact was questionable at best. For example, after a local father used deadly force to defend himself and his daughter from an assailant on Spalding Drive in September of 2024, Stuart posted a misspelled and factually inaccurate description of the incident (claiming the father had been stabbed) while also centering the story around how he felt seeing his campaign lawn sign wrapped in police tape.
(It should be noted that Stuart’s incessant fearmongering does not simply serve him electorally, but financially as well. Whenever tragedy rocks local communities, Stuart can be reliably found encouraging the public to hire security and buy guns in response — two things he just happens to sell.)
Stuart is also not above nakedly politicizing tragedy while the embers are still burning. In January of 2025, as Beverly Hills was surrounded by out-of-control wildfires, Stuart took to Instagram to communicate with his audience. Unlike virtually every other government official at the time, Stuart did not come bearing useful emergency services information or condolences to those losing their livelihoods, if not their actual lives. Rather, Stuart offered AI-generated anti-Democratic attack ads and suggestions that Angelenos brought this tragedy upon themselves through their anti-”common sense” voting choices.
To be sure, Stuart’s incessant drumbeat pays dividends. It got him to the Board, after all. The problem with being a one-trick pony, however, is that there are only so many swastikas lazily scrawled on the sidewalk to make a meal out of. Eventually, you need to diversify your offerings and deliver something tangible to voters. On this front, Stuart’s successes are tepid-to-nonexistent. The school censorship and antisemitism resolutions he pushed have been lingering sources of shame for the district, and his flashy five-year deal with Nike to supply BHUSD with athletic wear, which was bulldozed through committee, has yet to bear any fruit. Indeed, based on timing alone, the district likely got gouged, and Stuart’s insistence that the uniforms are “changing lives” by the dozens is sadly not translating to on-field success.
Given his record to date, it would not be surprising if Stuart was feeling the heat. With each passing week, more parents are gaining awareness of his responsibility for plunging BHUSD’s into previously-unheard-of levels of chaos and dysfunction. They have been showing up to Board meetings en masse to forcefully make their disapproval known and submitting scathing written takedowns for the official minutes. A recall petition against Stuart was even circulated. Unless he could reclaim the narrative, this was unsustainable. But how does one acquire good press when one isn’t doing anything worthy of good press?
You make your own press.
All The News Not Fit to Print
“Whoever controls the narrative, controls the people.”
On September 30, 2024, an anonymous registration appeared for the web domain beverlyhillsstandard.com. The domain and any website intended to accompany it lay dormant for many months. Then, on May 13, 2025, it suddenly sprung to life — just in time to heap praise on Stuart over his Nike deal.
The “article,” which reads like an obsequious press release rather than a legitimate journalistic endeavor, is immediately suspect to those with a modicum of media literacy. What is this publication? Who is “Ty Walker,” the ostensible author of the piece? Clicking on his website bio, we learn the following:
What a handsome young man, one may think. And look at that breadth of coverage! I’d sure love to experience his “approachable demeanor” in person. How can I do that? Maybe if I hover my mouse over that cute little icon next to his name, I’ll get his contact information or—
… Come again? “AI-generated journalist”? That’s not a thing. Just how many bylines have that icon?
At this point, a slow creeping realizartion dawns upon the reader.
This is not a news website. It’s an AI slop factory.
Let’s not mince words here: this is extremely strange stuff. Stuart founded a fake news website and populated it with a diverse cast of imaginary characters to provide himself with fawning coverage of his own career. How does Stuart differentiate his writers’ ostensible perspectives? Does he tell ChatGPT to write with the lived experience of “a former educator and parent” whenever he deploys his “Sarah Mitchell” persona? Where can we hear Grant Walters' "voice forged in the static of late-night radio"? Why is his only dedicated crime correspondent also the only Black man on this hallucinated masthead?
Setting these questions aside and filtering out the website’s voluminous roster of journo-bots, there appear to be two actual human contributors at the Standard. One is the previously-discussed Ellie Kadz, a longtime Stuart supporter and newly-appointed member of the BHUSD Finance Committee, who has written three glowing op-eds about Stuart’s work. The other is Lisa Stuart, Russell’s wife, who appears to focus on health and wellness content.
With the exception of a disclaimer hidden behind a button on BHUSD-related posts, Stuart seems keen to avoid highlighting his connection to the site for casual passers-by. Stuart’s personal Instagram account only included a promotional link to the Beverly Hills Standard’s Instagram account for approximately one week in late July of 2025 before Stuart apparently thought better of it. It is certainly easier to keep a straight face while sharing a praise-filled puff piece written by your friend about what an amazing job you happen to be doing if most people fail to realize you own the website that published it.
Media Manipulation For Fun and Profit
There are three explanations for why the Beverly Hills Standard exists, and none reflect well on Stuart.
The first, simplest, and most obvious explanation is reputation washing. The Beverly Hills Standard is an SEO gambit to obscure bad press about the Board’s controversial actions, as Stuart did not expect to earn positive media attention naturally, so he chose to fabricate it instead.
The second explanation is monetization. In addition to running ads on Beverly Hills Standard via Google AdSense, Stuart is selling both dedicated ad space and his own marketing production services, promising that he will help advertisers “[t]ap into one of the most influential and affluent audiences in the world.” He is even looking to franchise the website, with the “About Us” section entreating “advertisers,” “content contributors,” “city governments,” or anyone representing “a school district, city, or conservative community” to partner with Stuart (who, again, is held out a Board member for marketing purposes), join his “news ecosystem,” and launch “their own version of the Standard,” for which Stuart has a pending trademark registration. Essentially, Stuart is offering to license his robot-run reputation laundromat to embattled ideological allies, all in apparent violation of California Government Code § 1126 (which lists “incompatible activities” for public officers such as Stuart to include outside enterprises trading on "the badge, uniform, prestige, or influence” of BHUSD) and BHUSD Bylaw 9271 (which requires a Board member to “[c]onsider his/her position on the Board as a public trust and not use it for private advantage or personal gain”).
The third explanation, and possibly the most pernicious, is local radicalization. While purporting to deliver “truth-forward” journalism, Stuart’s website attempts to normalize extreme right-wing views held by fringe individuals by characterizing them as representative of Beverly Hills as a whole.
One particularlly galling example of Stuart’s attempt to push the Overton window rightward is an article entitled “Beverly Hills Residents Oppose City’s ACLU Lawsuit Involvement,” in which Toaster-American reporter “Alexandra Reed” highlights the comments of three individuals who testified at the August 5, 2025 meeting of the Beverly Hills City Council in opposition to the city’s participation in an ACLU lawsuit aimed at stopping the Trump administration’s indiscriminate ICE raids in the Los Angeles area. How representative are these three concerned individuals of the wider Beverly Hills community?
One of those individuals is Shiva Bagheri, whom you may remember from earlier in this piece. She is directly quoted in the article, featured on the cover image shared to social media, and listed as a collaborator on the Instagram post promoting it. The other two individuals are “Terry Christianson” (a misspelling of Terry Christensen) and “[a]nother speaker, identified as Toshio,” referring to Toshio (first name Paul) Onaga. Christensen is a longtime resident of Beverly Hills, as well as a disbarred attorney who served three years in federal prison for wiretapping the ex-wife of a client. Toshio Onaga, meanwhile, is a close associate of Bagheri’s, a Beverly Hills Freedom Rally “board” member, and is frequently involved in and/or present for her most disruptive antics.
Once Reed.exe is finished obscuring the reputations of these hooligans, she concludes her article with a waterfall of AI-generated stock phrases describing how Bagheri, Christensen, and Onaga are indicative of a “community debate” that “underscores tensions between local governance and involvement in federal legal battles,” which means nothing beyond “people are talking with words.” Who those people actually are and how much their words are worth is a question Reed — and, in turn, Stuart — would prefer not to answer. This is not journalism. It is propaganda in service of publicity, profit, and preferred ideology.
And that really sums up the entire ethos of not just the Beverly Hills Standard, but its principal as well.
Conclusion
As our picaresque narrative winds down, what are we to make of Russell Stuart, a man of so many talents? For one, you should be impressed. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to immiserate so many parents, shred so much of the social contract, and do so much damage to civic pride that this piece had to run over five thousand words to truly capture it all. (For those who have made it this far, you are clearly gluttons for punishment, but we thank you all the same.)
On a serious note, the real takeaway is this: Russell Stuart is not a man to be trusted.
He said he would govern on the Board as a conservative centrist. He has not.
He said the community would feel safe and secure with him at the helm. We do not.
He said the Beverly Hills community would soon bear witness to “magic” coming. It has not.
What we have seen is the opposite of confidence-inspiring. We have seen a man look to climb the ranks of the political far-right by using BHUSD's students as stepping stones. We have seen a man lash out at parents frightened over what his stewardship means for their children’s well-being, mock them, ridicule them, make them feel beaten and ignored, then boast of his brutish domination to all who will listen. We have seen a man lend BHUSD’s credibility to prop up the worst among us, to poison our discourse, and to build machinery for self-enrichment at the expense of those caught in its belching exhaust.
And now, fully catalogued, the world can see it as well.
Whether such a man deserves to lead is a question we believe answers itself.