In the later stages of Soviet active measures, ridicule became a precision instrument. The goal was not merely to discredit an opponent. It was to dissolve the moral taboo that once protected him. Once an enemy could be laughed at in public, the psychological cost of violence against him dropped. Yuri Bezmenov, the KGB defector who later described the demoralization process in clinical detail, noted that the technique worked by conditioning entire cohorts to treat the previously unthinkable as entertainment. The laughter was the solvent.

That solvent was on full display at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre on August 21. Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer and democratic socialist, opened the West Coast leg of the Fear& LIVE tour by leading the audience in the meme song “We Are Charlie Kirk.” The lyrics, written in the style of a Christian power ballad shortly after Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, include the lines “We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame. We’ll fight for the Gospel, we’ll honor his name.” Piker sang them. His co-hosts Will Neff, QTCinderella, and AustinShow laughed. The crowd joined in. Piker wore his now-signature Mao-style jacket.

Jonathan Turley, who first dissected the performance in detail, observed that the shock is not only the cruelty of the performer but the ecstasy of the audience. The video shows precisely that. Young faces lit by stage light, phones raised, voices rising with the chorus. The murder of a political opponent had become a sing-along.

The mechanism, not the mood

This is not spontaneous bad taste. It is a documented procedure. Soviet propaganda organs spent decades refining the conversion of ideological enemies into objects of collective amusement. Caricature, satirical song, and staged public mockery served as pre-violence conditioning. Once the target had been rendered ridiculous, the next step (denunciation, isolation, or physical removal) required less internal resistance from the audience. The technique traveled. It survived the collapse of the state that perfected it because the method itself is portable.

Piker’s performance maps onto that procedure with unusual clarity. The song was not his invention. It circulated after Kirk’s death as both tribute and mockery, depending on the user. By performing it live, in costume, before a paying crowd that already shared his politics, Piker completed the ritual. The Mao jacket is not costume drama. It is a signal of lineage. The laughter is the metric of successful demoralization.

When a murdered man’s faith becomes karaoke, the taboo has already been dissolved. The only remaining question is how far the conditioning has spread beyond the theater.

Turley places the scene inside what he has called an “age of rage.” The phrase is useful but incomplete. Rage is the emotion. The method is older. Demoralization campaigns do not require the rage to be spontaneous. They require it to be cultivated, rewarded, and repeated until it feels like belonging.

The transmission layer

The ecosystem that produced the Golden Gate Theatre moment is not mysterious. Piker’s audience is young, heavily online, and already primed by years of content that treats political opponents as legitimate targets of contempt. The same circuits that amplified campus justifications for violence after October 7, and that celebrated or excused earlier political attacks, now reward the conversion of assassination into entertainment. Turley notes that figures such as Jennifer Welch have openly justified Kirk’s murder. The San Francisco crowd did not invent the permission structure. It performed it.

What distinguishes the event is the collective form. Solo online mockery is common. A live, synchronized sing-along with projected lyrics and a cheering hall is a ritual. Rituals accelerate conditioning. They convert private pleasure in another’s death into public belonging. The Soviet method relied on the same conversion: the individual who laughs alone may still feel residual unease. The individual who laughs with the hall has already crossed the threshold.

Piker’s later response to criticism (claiming greater respect for Kirk than many Republicans display, and dismissing critics as grifters) is consistent with the method. The perpetrator of the ritual reframes the objection as bad faith. The laughter remains the evidence.

Structural parallel

The technique is not uniquely Soviet, but the Soviet refinement of it is the clearest paper trail. Demoralization, as Bezmenov outlined it, proceeds by stages. First the moral boundaries are blurred. Then the blurring is celebrated. Then the celebration is institutionalized as culture. At that point the society no longer requires external pressure to accept the next escalation. It generates the escalation itself.

The Golden Gate Theatre performance sits in the second and third stages simultaneously. The murder is mocked. The mockery is performed as entertainment. The audience is rewarded with the feeling of being on the correct side of history. The Mao jacket supplies the aesthetic continuity. None of this requires a central committee. The method has become self-replicating.

Assassination becomes a sing-along when the prior work of demoralization has already succeeded. The song is not the beginning of the process. It is the proof that the process has advanced.

Turley’s larger point holds: the American left has found its berserkers, figures who offer the chance to hate without remainder. The historical mechanism clarifies why the offer is taken up so readily. Rage is addictive. Ritualized rage is more addictive still. Once the taboo against celebrating political murder is dissolved in public, the restoration of that taboo becomes the harder task.

The San Francisco crowd left the theater having practiced the procedure. The video remains. The conditioning continues.