Reddit reviews The Rise and Fall of Synanon: A California Utopia

Yeah, so many people have this idea of ISIS radicals being just really devout muslims who got into bombing as part of their religion.

The reality is that, first and foremost, they resemble the proto-alt-righter: a depressed, listless, rejected, usually young male, with an authoritarian and aggressive personality. After that, it's normal brainwashing techniques: approached in a time of weakness, torn down emotionally, encouraged to trash all aspects of their previous life, and slowly trained by incremental reward to follow the agenda.

If you're interested in how that works, I recommend reading this book about Synanon.

Also: https://medium.com/@GillBranstetter/the-alt-right-is-a-doomsday-cult-b40edd66062a

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/28/alt-right-online-poison-racist-bigot-sam-harris-milo-yiannopoulos-islamophobia

Terrorists are often cultists. That's not to say they're not culpable for their actions, but the patterns tend to resemble each other.