Book Review: The Cabal Question
Misadventures Outside the Overton Window
When I last had the privilege of hosting Dr. Michael Rectenwald on my YouTube channel, we dove deep into the Middle East conflict and the Israel-Gaza war, unpacking Zionism, Jewish identity, and the edges of theology. At one point in our conversation, we shifted gears to talk about our respective writing projects. Mine, a screenplay in development, and his, a forthcoming book titled The Cabal Question.
The title itself is an alchemical fusion of two of the most volatile topics in circulation today: The Jewish Question and the idea of a global Cabal controlling world affairs. Together, they form a combination of words that somehow stabilizes the reaction long enough to be printable, while simultaneously raising the stakes with their provocative intersection.
While The Cabal Question isn’t quite an espionage novel, it carries the tension of a political thriller with the atmosphere of a Bond film layered by sharp suspense and an intrepid intellectual curiosity.
Show, Don’t Tell
During the aforementioned interview, I worried that I might have inadvertently stepped on his dialogue emphasis by referencing the screenwriter’s axiom, “show, don’t tell.” With Rectenwald’s extensive academic bona fides, and a dense seven-page foreward, I half-expected the book to lean heavily on exposition or theory, with momentum taking a back seat. But The Cabal Question put that expectation to rest immediately.
Rectenwald not only manages to layer in plenty of action, he does so without sacrificing intellectual rigor. When dialogue takes over, it does so with clarity and consequence. It isn’t a screenplay, but would pass a screenwriter’s test all the same.
Seth?! What’s “Seth?” It’s a person. A friend of mine. He’s threatening to kill himself, Paul said, pointing to his phone. What kind of a sick joke is this? It’s not a joke. I’m dead serious. Just then Seth’s miniature voice screamed through the speaker.
From the very first page, the narrative grabs hold with more urgency than most fiction dares attempt. In film terms, it decimates the “hook ‘em in ten” rule on the very first page. The protagonist, Paul Becker, an apparent avatar and ultimate effigy of Rectenwald, climbs the Martinikerk bell tower in Groningen, but before he even settles at the top, the bells explode into sound and his phone rings. On the line is his friend Seth, straddling a seventh-floor windowsill with a noose around his neck, the rope tied to a pipe behind him, threatening to jump.
The Plot Thickens
This is not some slow burn, and it is not just some abstraction. It moves fast and keeps moving. By page five, the protagonist isn’t just using Bond-style pickup lines on an attractive Dutch blonde; he’s doing it while talking on the phone with a suicidal friend who’s mid-rant, unloading racial theories and apocalyptic claims that most people wouldn’t even think to whisper in private, let alone in the company of strangers.
Paul is soon interrogated by police under suspicion of a hate crime after his friend Seth is overheard ranting on speakerphone at a nearby Groningen café with the woman. What began as a private conversation is now evidence in an international investigation. Confined to his hotel room while awaiting permission to leave, Paul realizes he has been pulled into a web of surveillance and guilt by association, possibly being set up as an example for committing a thought crime.
“Paul pulled the passport from the envelope and lit on his new name. He was now Lars Kunde”
Rather than take his chances, he accepts an offer to leave the country under an assumed name, Lars Kunde. Caught between academic inquiry and political taboo, he becomes a person of interest, swept into a network of secret meetings, safe houses, coded exchanges, and sudden disappearances among the other usual suspects. The tone evokes Ian Fleming, but the stakes are more existential. The danger is not only physical, but reputational, legal, psychological, and even theological, creeping into the reader’s own world with each turned page.
Along the way, Paul is joined by two women whose roles are anything but incidental, including Eva, the woman from the café, who stays with him through most of the journey. Their presence adds both intrigue and intimacy, softening the book’s ideological tension while intensifying the lure of seduction and suspicion. Both women act as mirrors and counterweights to Paul’s growing unease, grounding the narrative in human connection amid rising peril.
The JQ Book Club
After fleeing Europe, Paul returns to the United States, and the chase gives way to a long, charged interlude in which the protagonist enters what amounts to a high-stakes seminar in forbidden inquiry. Now in hiding after fleeing police scrutiny, he spends this time reading, debating, and re-evaluating everything he once thought settled. His companions, Eva, Anneliese, and later Eli Yoder, each contribute a different lens, not to radicalize Paul, but to challenge his trust in official narratives.
The texts they engage are real and controversial: Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, Germar Rudolf’s The Rudolf Report, and most notoriously, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Each is introduced in dialogue, not dogma, and treated as evidence that demands scrutiny. MacDonald’s thesis on Jewish intellectual subversion is framed by Eva as a strategic cultural shift. Shahak’s critique of Talmudic ethics gives Paul language for questions he has been circling. Ellul’s framework on how propaganda adapts to mass media helps him see control operating through language. Eli, a Mennonite, presents Holocaust revisionism as an act of faith, questioning even the most sanctified history.
“It’s either a fabulous hoax or the master key, he said. Or it could be both.”
When The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appear, Paul knows it is propaganda. He says as much. But what troubles him is its apparent accuracy. Events in his world begin to unfold in ways that mirror what the Protocols describe. He does not accept the text as literally true, but he cannot deny the shape of a world resembling its outline. This contradiction becomes the engine of his inner conflict.
If there is an anonymous “Q” in this story, it is not Fleming’s clever supplier of gadgets, nor the lost gospel said to lie behind the synoptic texts. It is a whisper threaded through forged documents and sacred footnotes alike. The Protocols mirror an earlier mystery: that absent voice behind the New Testament. Both may be fabrications or insertions, yet Paul wonders if they are not also attempts to reverse-engineer a buried architecture of truth. Textual criticism, after all, is less a science of proof than a pursuit of the spirit that animates the word.
Rectenwald does not resolve this conflict for Paul, nor for us. Instead he uses Paul as a vehicle to exhaust the material. He asks the harder questions so we don’t have to fear their inquiry. From Zionism and the Gaza conflict through the Protocols all the way down to Holocaust Revisionism, no question is sidestepped.
He begins with the intent to refute what he assumes are fringe claims. But as he moves through the material, the trail continues to return to an unavoidable subject: the Jewish Question.
Long, Dark, Deep-dive of the Soul
Defying genre expectations, the story’s climax is not a boss fight or shootout but an arrest. Paul is charged with hate crimes. Among them is the accusation of “anti-Judaism,” a fictionalized legal category created by the novel's setting to criminalize patterns of thought. This moment is not simply a legal twist, but the story’s moral collapse point. Paul, who set out to understand the world more deeply, is now branded an enemy of it.
For all the third rail content the book contends with, there is no Nazi conspiracy, no coded hate, no affiliation with extremists, no intention to do harm. Paul is not isolated or unstable. He is a respected professor, a thoughtful man whose life and work have always followed the evidence. What drives him is not ideology but sincere, searching curiosity.
And he is not alone. He is introduced to other people. Some are intentionally placed to radicalize him, others are independent seekers. Through them, Paul is exposed to more extreme ideas than he would have sought out on his own, but entertains them out of a need to make sense of their recurring presence. The process is not ideological but psychological, layered with the constant fear that thinking too much might destroy him, with refraining too much of a concession. Already outside of a false Overton window, he has no guardrails to trust.
There are theological contrasts as well. Christianity and Talmudic Judaism are placed in conversation. Some scenes feature dark or even satanic imagery. The spiritual backdrop of the story is thick with symbolism and actual hard problems of faith and existential dread. This is not only a secular world. It is a world where metaphysical questions still matter, and where power is not just political, but spiritually bound with meaning.
“Anti-Semitic! Anti-Semitic! it bellowed, its voice now deep and enormous, spitting the words at him like venom.”
One chapter titled The Noticing encapsulates Paul’s dilemma. He is not trying to reach a conclusion. He is trying to survive the act of seeing. As he observes the patterns, he begins to have dreams. Visions. Nightmares, even. In them, he is called names. Holocaust denier. Anti-Semite. Fascist. These visions haunt him, because they are not merely insults. They are accusations with consequences. He knows that merely reading certain documents, asking certain questions, will invite ruin.
And while Paul’s search for truth drives the plot, the relationship at the heart of his personal journey only comes into focus near the end. When it finally takes shape, the emotion feels real, but the moments are too brief. One wishes their connection had been given more space to breathe and grow, allowing its impact on Paul’s inner life to be more fully revealed.
Free Man on the Lam
Libertarian themes are strongly present throughout. In this dystopian world too close to our own, even hearing someone speak such thoughts can implicate you. It is a clear critique of speech laws and the expanding reach of the state into the realm of private conscience.
“He was the eternal convict, incarcerated before birth and now conscious that the state had always been prepared to receive him—into the slavery of law, debt, taxes, and now, imprisonment”
This concern deepens as the story progresses. The state is not portrayed as neutral, but as something co-opted by powerful interests, the Cabal, for which the phrase “Jewish Mafia” is coined. This phrase cautiously crafted to name a power structure that cannot be publicly identified. In a climate where self-censorship is required for self-preservation, the story’s warning about the erosion of individual liberty is underscored.
Even Paul’s flight from Europe under an assumed name, while lending itself a flair of espionage, invalidates the legitimacy of the state that would otherwise restrict his liberty.
In a key subplot, Paul meets a family living off-grid. They live close to the land. They reject modernity. Their life offers a kind of alternative to the dystopia Paul is navigating. It is not a utopia, but a nod to the sovereign citizen ideal, a path of resistance and also a real insight into the book’s Libertarian soul. It is a world where living simply may be the only escape from total control, an island outside the archipelago.
And yet, even this is not enough. The story ends not with resolution, but with a moment of hope, followed by tragedy. The final turn is quiet and irreversible. It leaves the reader with a sense of loss, not just for a character, but for a world where asking questions is still allowed. Orwell’s statist boot, “stamping on a human face, forever.”
The Cabal Question is not a manifesto. It is not a screed. It is a story. But it is a dangerous one, because it dares to make its protagonist authentically curious, and thereby the reader too, refusing to protect either from the consequences. It is part spy thriller, part political diagnosis, part philosophical inquiry. It is not trying to answer the question, but to survive the act of asking it.
Buy The Cabal Question on Amazon
Michael Rectenwald on Substack