John F. Sendelbach

Monday, June 1, 2026

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

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:

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.

PETITION FOR INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION

Shelburne Police Department and Municipal Officials — A Six-Year Documented Record of Selective Enforcement, Institutional Failure, Embedded Conflicts of Interest, and Escalating Harm to a Whistleblower

Initiated by: John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

To:

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell

Northwestern District Attorney's Office · First ADA Steven Gagne

Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST)

Shelburne Board of Selectmen · Buckland Board of Selectmen

Franklin County Sheriff's Department

Every fact stated in this petition is drawn from police reports, court dockets, federal court orders, DA investigations, sworn testimony, medical records, and documented video and audio evidence. All cited case numbers, report numbers, and docket numbers are on the public record. Nothing in this petition is a legal conclusion. All referenced legal findings are those of sitting judges in active proceedings.

This is not a complaint about a neighborhood dispute. It is a documented record of a municipal police department whose written policy of selective enforcement produced a predictable six-year chain of escalating harm — ignored warnings, a false criminal charge, a public beating, the destruction of evidence, and a continuing failure to self-correct even as federal courts and state investigators accumulated findings against its personnel. It is also a record of a Select Board that was warned, responded with silence, and then endorsed the department with public money. And it is, at this writing, a whistleblower safety statement from a citizen who has documented reasons to fear what comes next.

Hennessey last weekend: "I Just Have to Do Something About It"

THE PATTERN THAT WILL NOT STOP
On Katherine Hennessey, Zachary Livingston, and What “I Just Have to Do Something About It” Means Six Months Into BailBy John F. Sendelbach · May 2026

“When I see something wrong, I just have to do something about it.”
That was the line Katherine Hennessey was heard saying at a gathering approximately five days ago. Five words that illuminate a long-running behavioral pattern.
A credible firsthand source who was present reports that Hennessey was expressing open anger at Zachary Livingston — the man whose sworn statement is now the prosecution’s cleanest independent evidence in Commonwealth v. Hennessey (2641CR000158) and Commonwealth v. Batteau (2641CR000159). She was badmouthing the Commonwealth’s star witness six months after her arraignment.

Shelburne Goons deploy civil rights violations on behalf of the Bridge of Flowers Classic

August 2024....Look at this fucking screenshot!.

There’s Chief Bardwell, puffed up in his tactical vest like a steroid-fed mall cop, mouth open, eyes hidden behind those impenetrable mirrored shades, crowding my lens like he’s trying to swallow the truth whole. In the background, Sgt. Kurt Gilmore — glowing like a radioactive traffic cone in his highlighter-yellow vest — is squared up, hands near his belt, actively blocking my camera while the real aggressor walks free. Gilmore doesn’t touch the guy screaming threats at me. No. He shakes the motherfucker’s hand like old golf buddies and sends him on his way.They don’t even realize they are violating my rights. Therein lies the danger… they make their own rules.
Bardwell threatened me with arrest three separate times for the high crime of trying to bring a legitimate grievance to the race director, Mike McCusker — that spandex-wearing prick who shuts down our town every summer under the holy banner of “economic benefit.”
This is the exact pathology of a small-town police department that has completely detached itself from constitutional limits. When these guys step into a scene, they don’t operate on law — they operate on instinct, personal alliances, and pure institutional arrogance.