"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
