The Christopher Dorner fan club is more mainstream than you might think

Online support for Dorner in the days since his rampage has crept out of the internet’s more extreme corners — where such perverse boosterism is commonplace — and into more mainstream venues. Dorner is now hailed as a kind of folk hero by some on the Chomsky-esque left and the Ron Paul right, who view the killer’s manifesto as an articulate indictment of the “police state” they have always opposed. …

Groups dedicated to Dorner on Facebook range from “We Support Christopher Dorner” to “We Are All Chris Dorner” to “Teamdorner” and others. The #DornerGang hashtag is alive and well on Twitter, as are multiple fever-swamp conspiracy theories about the circumstances of Dorner’s crimes and death. …

Salon’s Natasha Lennard has written a couple of stories sympathetic to Dorner (“Ex-cops sympathize with Dorner’s anger,” “Were Dorner’s complaints legitimate?”). Vice, in a story about whether or not Anonymous will retaliate after Dorner’s death, implicitly compared Dorner to anti-establishment heroes like Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz, while acknowledging that “a murderous ex-cop is a lot harder to defend than these nonviolent liberators of information.”