The problem we see at this Flag Day's protests focusing on "No Kings" flows straight out laziness on the part of ordinary American protesters. (I am not addressing illegal aliens here.)
No one predicted that maintaining a democratic republic would be easy. Even Benjamin Franklin, when asked on September 17, 1787, what they had done in Philadelphia's Constitutional Convention, remarked, "we have given you a republic - if you can keep it."
Can we keep it? That requires engagement by the majority of citizens, free open discussion and debate, taking time to vote, and supporting the absolute upholding of law and order. It may mean you, who are so angry or disgusted with the direction of your city, your state, or your country, may well have to talk to enough of your neighbors to eventually run for office and see how much better you do at leading. Use the system. That is how it is designed. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot possibly be a tyrannical government - unless you do nothing.
So, keeping a republic requires active interest in the direction of our country as a society, a culture and a powerful political entity.
Whining to the media, "No kings!" betrays your responsibility to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT when you are unsatisfied with our direction. In the United States we schedule a potential revolution every two years. Throw the bums out. Put new bums in. You could be one of them.
The current protests are heavily funded and organized by Chinese communists, and others who operate freely in our country. What's wrong with communism? It is a lie.
Marx and Engels wrote that the communist state would free the proletariat (a class of people who never existed in the United States.) They declared that after the proletarian revolution the communist state would no longer be needed and simply "wither away." That's the lie. Look at how it actually played out in the Soviet Union. Look at how it is playing out in China. Both became totalitarian regimes who killed or are killing millions of their own people.
Marx’s thesis of material dialectics on which communism is presumably based, if it were true, would have met up with an antithesis and that meeting would have led to a new synthesis. Is today's Russia any kind of new synthesis? Of course not. It's an oligarchy. Does China look as if it is on the cusp of a wonderful new synthesis of governance? Hardly. Power always seeks to concentrate in the hands of a few. That's the genius of our Constitution: the separation of powers.
History soundly disproves the flawed theories of Marx and Engels. So why are Americans so attracted to its empty promises? They are dramatic. They sound good. They are easily consumed by ignoramuses who refuse to do the hard work of learning how our system of government works, that it puts responsibility on the citizen to knowledgeably and meaningfully participate, and that escaping into helplessness as if you are a victim of your government, is NOT AN OPTION.
Yes. It is hard work. Put up or shut up.