He said watching Dorner’s rampage, after he was “wronged” by the system, was “kind of exciting” and like watching “Django Unchained in real life.”
Now that the manhunt to catch accused murderer Christopher Dorner has ended, the ex-cop has become something of a martyr to thousands of supporters on social media. Fueled by the action movie-style tactics he used in his war against the LAPD and claims of police abuse made in his manifesto, support for Dorner continues to grow. Just hours after he was apparently killed after an armed standoff in Big Bear, Calif., one of his biggest fan pages on Facebook posted, “The spirit of Chris #Dorner will live on forever in our hearts, as an eternal flame – symbolic of the will to stand up in an attempt to eradicate those who would seek to oppress us, by any means necessary, when no one else would.”
A group of panelists on CNN tried to make sense of the phenomenon this afternoon.
“This has been an important conversation that we’ve had about police brutality, about police corruption, about state violence,” said Huffington Post Live host and Columbia University professor Marc Lamont Hill. “They were even talking about making him the first domestic drone target. This is serious business here. I don’t think it’s been a waste of time at all. And as far as Dorner himself goes, he’s been like a real life superhero to many people. Now don’t get me wrong. What he did was awful, killing innocent people was bad, but when you read his manifesto, when you read the message that he left, he wasn’t entirely crazy. He had a plan and a mission here. And many people aren’t rooting for him to kill innocent people. They are rooting for somebody who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It’s almost like watching Django Unchained in real life. It’s kind of exciting.”
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