Still, the Internet churns with anonymous social media commentary and videos deriding the monarchy, and a growing underground republican movement is challenging its very premise.
“The current anti-monarchy movement is due to the very fact that the monarchy is now made into almighty god,” said Sulak Sivaraksa, a social activist and scholar who has been charged or arrested five times for his outspokenness about the king. “The more you make the monarchy sacred, the more it becomes unaccountable and something beyond common sense.”