The Gnome and the Stones: Burning Man, Thirty Feet of Kitsch, and What Local Media Still Refuses to See

GNOME AND THE STONES

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · 2026

On June 2, 2026, Western Mass News ran a glowing profile of a Hampshire County artist planning to bring a thirty-foot wooden garden gnome with pyrotechnics shooting flames from its hat and mouth to the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. The project recently became one of seventy-five installations selected to receive a $16,000 honorarium grant from the Burning Man organization to help transport the finished structure. The artist is building part of it on family properties in Shelburne Falls.

His name is Ezra Livingston.

For readers of this archive, that name requires no elaboration. For readers arriving here fresh, the relevant context is documented elsewhere at johnsendelbach.com and will surface naturally by the end of this essay. What I want to say at the outset, plainly and without qualification, is this: Ezra Livingston is by any fair accounting one of the more genuinely creative people in this valley. A 1999 UMass Amherst graduate with a documented track record of installations at Burning Man since 2016 — La Victrola, Shrine of the Macabre, Andas the Turtle — he is a working artist with real skills and real ambition. This essay is not an attack on him.

Black Lives Matter?

On Demographic Reality, Organizational Accountability, and the Suppression of Inconvenient Evidence

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · June 2026

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METHODOLOGY NOTE

This paper relies primarily on data produced by organizations that support abortion access. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Abortion Surveillance Reports constitute the primary longitudinal statistical source. The Guttmacher Institute, which explicitly advocates for reproductive rights, provides supplementary data on provider location and access. Where pro-life organizations compile or analyze this data — as in the Abort73.com racial breakdown — their methodology is documented and their primary sources are the same federal datasets.

This sourcing choice is deliberate. The demographic trends documented in Section II are not the product of pro-life advocacy research. They are produced by the same institutional apparatus that provides the primary evidence base for pro-choice policy arguments. A reader who trusts Guttmacher on abortion access should trust Guttmacher on abortion demographics.

Methodological limitations are noted where relevant. CDC race reporting is incomplete in some years. Some states do not report to federal surveillance systems. Guttmacher and CDC produce different totals due to different data collection methodologies. These limitations do not affect the directional conclusions. The trend documented below is consistent across both datasets across five decades.

NOPE © 2026 John F. Sendelbach

THE GUILT INDUSTRY: FROM ROOTS TO RUIN

THE GUILT INDUSTRY: FROM ROOTS TO RUIN

How American Antiracism Became a Closed Epistemic System and What It Did to One Town in Western Massachusetts

By John F. Sendelbach

They went looking for a racist and found an artist who wanted to be famous.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Let me tell you what this book is not.

It is not a screed by someone who hates Black people. It is not a manifesto by someone who thinks racism never existed or doesn't exist now. It is not a culture war hit piece assembled by a think tank, funded by a billionaire, or ghost-written by someone who needed a controversy to sell subscriptions.

It is a receipts book. Written by someone who has the receipts.

The Laminated Verdict: What a Thumbtacked Sign Reveals About Institutional Failure, Fiduciary Duty, and the Psychosis of 2020

There is a photograph on this site of a laminated sign thumbtacked to a wooden fence on the Bridge of Flowers. It reads:

"In Memory. Remembering all victims of racial or ethnic violence or hate crimes. Just as many colors and varieties of bloom make this garden more beautiful, many skin shades and diversity in humans make our communities better places. Please take a moment to consider what you can do to prevent future victims."

Thumbtacks. Laminated paper. On a historic stone and iron bridge in a National Historic District.

Distributed Maintenance: A Theory of Narrative Stabilization in Social Systems

I. The Problem

Some harmful narratives about people stop when the person spreading them stops. Others don't.

This is the central problem the existing frameworks for narrative inversion have not adequately solved. The DARVO model, institutional betrayal theory, and related frameworks are primarily actor-focused: they describe what perpetrators and institutions do during the active phase of a campaign. They assume, at least implicitly, that the harm engine requires ongoing input from an identifiable actor. Remove the actor — hold them accountable, expose the pattern, exit the relationship — and the harm should stop.

It frequently doesn't.

In a significant and recognizable class of cases, the original actor disengages entirely. They stop pressing the narrative. They step away from the institutions that had been processing the harm. They move on. And the narrative continues. Communities maintain it without being instructed to. Institutions filter new information through it automatically. Social networks sustain it through ordinary interaction. The target's attempts to correct the record are processed through the lens of the narrative they are trying to correct, and those attempts become, in a perverse feedback loop, additional evidence for the narrative's accuracy.

This paper calls that phenomenon Distributed Maintenance. The central claim is:

Narrative formation and narrative maintenance are analytically distinct processes. Narratives can become self-sustaining after the original actor disengages, driven by identifiable mechanisms within social systems rather than by continued active maintenance from any originating actor. These mechanisms operate similarly regardless of whether the narrative being maintained is true, false, malicious, accidental, or politically constructed.

How I Use AI to Build My Database and Knowledge Base

I. Introduction: From Trauma to Architecture

For six straight years, a network of people in this town tried to destroy my life. False reports, front-page smears, secret meetings, false court filings, and eventually a physical assault that sent my heart into documented atrial fibrillation at 230 beats per minute. It would have been easy to stay trapped in that trauma, replaying the gaslighting and the silence from the institutions that should have protected me.

I chose a different path. I stopped being just a victim of the record and became its architect. I turned the wreckage of those years into a public, living knowledge base. My website, johnsendelbach.com, is no longer just a collection of angry posts. It is my external hard drive, my forensic database, and my analytical workshop. Every police report, court docket, audio transcript, medical record, and timestamp is there — fully public, no login, no fee.

The Illusion of Choice: Why I’ve Never Voted and Why the Two-Party System Is a Rigged Theater

Prologue: The Position

I am a right-of-center libertarian who practices conscientious non-voting. I reject the standard left-right political paradigm, viewing it instead as a circle where the extremes meet in their shared authoritarian enforcement mechanisms. My position is characterized by the following observations:

• Political Identity: I identify as a right-of-center libertarian, favoring individual liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, and free markets that are not captured by cronyism.

• Conscientious Objection: I view the act of voting in a "busted" two-party system as an immoral act of feeding a machine I fundamentally oppose. I liken this position to Vietnam-era draft resisters who refused to participate in an immoral system.

• Structural Skepticism: I contend that the U.S. political system is a "rigged theater"—a closed loop of management controlled by a donor class, corporate interests, and foreign lobbies—regardless of which party occupies the White House.

• Critique of Conformity: I observe a direct parallel between the progressive mob that targeted me in Shelburne Falls and authoritarian "MAGA" or left-leaning mobs; both utilize identical mechanisms of social enforcement to silence dissent and demand conformity to their respective "sacred cows."

• Rejection of Tribalism: I explicitly reject being labeled a "Trumper" or "MAGA" supporter. I analyze systems from the outside rather than aligning with any "team," as both wings are constrained by the same underlying power structures.

I. Introduction: The Conscientious Non-Voter Position

I have never voted in my life. Not once. Not for president, not for senator, not for governor, not even for local dog catcher. I am now in my late fifties, and I have never pulled a lever or filled out a ballot.

People call this irresponsible. They say I’m throwing my voice away. They say if good people don’t vote, the bad ones win. They say I have no right to complain if I don’t participate.

They are wrong.

The Enforcers: On Five Waves of Feminism, the Bridge of Flowers Committee, and the Women Who Became What They Fought

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · June 2026

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I support feminism.

I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because the rest of this essay will be difficult and I am not interested in being misread. The project of equal rights, equal political voice, equal access to public life, equal protection under law — these are not controversial to me. They are axiomatic. The documented history of what women were denied, and what they fought to claim, is one of the most important stories in American civic life.

I am also a man who was called a misogynist, a woman-hater, a racist, and an antisemite by a campaign that was organized and executed almost entirely by women, in the name of the very principles those words are designed to protect.

What follows is not an attack on feminism. It is a documentation of what happens when the tools and vocabulary of a liberation movement are captured by a social enforcement mechanism and turned against the people the movement was supposed to protect — including, in the end, women themselves.

An Open Letter to Rev. Kate Stevens, the Leadership of Trinity Church, and the Institutional Leaders Who Have Said Nothing

To Rev. Kate Stevens:

You wrote in the Greenfield Recorder on June 20, 2020: "We need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told."

I am writing to offer you the opportunity to do exactly that.

You know me. You officiated the wedding of Julie and Dave — people I care about. We have been in the same rooms, at the same tables, in this valley. You know the kind of person I am, or you did.

On June 6, 2020, you co-organized a protest at the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls. You recruited peacekeepers. You helped design the ceremony — the kneel, the chant, the silence. You published a moving account of the event in the Recorder, in which you described the emotional weight of the moment and called on the community to do the work of listening.

Your account did not mention me.

Part 2: Dark Tetrad vs.High-Functioning Distress Tolerance & Post-Traumatic Growth

The Anti-Psychopath: A Clinical Comparison the Literature Isn't Equipped to Make

Dark Tetrad vs. Its Documented Inverse, Across Six Years of Parallel Behavioral Records

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

The clinical literature on personality pathology is well-developed in one direction.

It has precise, validated instruments for measuring what goes wrong with a human mind under social and institutional conditions. It has the Dark Tetrad. It has the PCL-R. It has decades of research on narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism — their signatures, their escalation patterns, their resistance to intervention, their effects on the people around them.

What the literature almost entirely lacks is language for the documented inverse: the person who absorbs six years of Dark Tetrad behavior directed at them and produces, instead of an equivalent explosion, a behavioral theory, a park design, a native plant nursery, and a 30,000-word public archive.

That gap is what this essay is about.

Part 1: The Mental Evaluation They Should Be Requesting — And Who Should Be in the Chair

A Sarcastic, Documented, Thoroughly Unsympathetic Analysis of Six Years of Projection in Western Massachusetts

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

I hear they want to give me a mental evaluation.

I want to go on record as fully supportive of this initiative. Mental health screenings are valuable. Early intervention saves lives. The therapeutic community of western Massachusetts deserves our respect and our business.

I would simply like to suggest, with the utmost professional courtesy, that they may have identified the wrong patient.

Allow me to make the case.

Exhibit A: The Affidavit That Accidentally Diagnosed Its Author

On March 3, 2023, Katherine Hennessey submitted a sworn affidavit to the Greenfield District Court. In it, she stated — under penalty of perjury, before a judge, as a formal legal document — that she believed I would "try to hurt or even kill me or members of my family."

She then added the dog!!!

The Women Who Broke the Bridge

Part I: The Bench and the Cosmic Joke

There is a polished granite bench on a hill in Buckland Cemetery overlooking the Deerfield River valley. I cut it myself. The Garfield Wright family — a local Jewish family — asked me to move large stones from their property and shape a permanent memorial for Susan after she died. They wanted it solid enough to last centuries, with space for a bronze plaque telling her story. I gave them exactly that.

The stone is dense, cool to the touch even in summer sun, with tight grain that takes a mirror polish. Run your hand across it and you feel the hours I spent — the rasp of the diamond pads, the wet slurry, the final buff that makes it shine like dark water. When I finished bolting it down that day, the church chimes across the valley started playing Amazing Grace. I stopped working, stood up straight, and just listened. The notes drifted over the river, through the maples, and landed right on that bench like some divine punchline. A Jewish family trusted me — a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape guy — with their dead. And here I was, thirty-five years into building things people actually use: benches, fountains, memorials, ironwork that holds up bridges and lives.

And down in the valley, a network of women had spent six straight years trying to erase me from existence.

Frankenstein Gates, Flower Bridges

The Bridge of Flowers — that 400-foot reinforced concrete arch masterpiece built in 1908 as a trolley bridge, lovingly transformed in 1929 by the Shelburne Falls Women’s Club into the world’s most romantic floating garden — just got a multimillion-dollar facelift. New concrete, fresh paint, the whole nine yards. And then they bolted on these fence posts. Behold, the monstrosity:

Outing the Small-Town Theater of Rushing with COVID, Screaming Profanities, and Calling It "Child Safety"

There is a moment from June 6, 2020 that has stayed with me longer than most.

The confrontation on the Iron Bridge had wound down. The locked elbows, the following, the screaming — all of it had settled into the uneasy aftermath that follows public scenes in small towns. Katherine Hennessey was still there. In the conversation that followed she said something I have turned over in my mind many times since:

"I'm here for the kids so they know they're safe."

I said: "I am here for the adults who are actually operating on this information."

What follows is a documented analysis of what "being there for the children" looked like in practice across six years of recorded, sworn, and witnessed events. All video and audio referenced in this piece exists. The transcripts are the record.


1. June 6, 2020: The Origin

The raw transcript of the June 6, 2020 video — the one Alouette Batteau posted to Facebook, which reached twenty-two thousand people and was covered by the Greenfield Recorder without an interview from me — is in the public record.

At timestamp 7:23, Katherine Hennessey states directly: "I'm here with signs like that to let the children, the brown children who live in this town... I'm here for the kids so they know they're safe."

Those children were present on the bridge during this confrontation. They were present while adults screamed profanities. They were present while a group of people followed a man who was trying to walk away, locked elbows to block his path, and refused to let him pass.

The profanities were directed at me. "Fuck you, John Sendelbach" — at volume, on a public bridge, in the presence of those children, by the adults who had brought them there. The camera was rolling. The moral credential and the recorded conduct exist on the very same tape.