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.”