President Donald J. Trump, for all his defects, speaks to white Americans, badgered ceaselessly, told to renounce their heritage and confess ancestral sins. Too many of them — millions — have put up quite a while with censure they feel is unwarranted and unjust. They are in revolt against their priestly inquisitors, and a new round of the culture wars is underway.

This quasi-religious caste and its diversity catechism now direct the nation’s institutions. Not only in media, academe, advertising, and entertainment but also in corporations, government, and the military, chaplains of diversity enforce the new canon law. Convinced of its special moral vision, this caste has no intention of ceding power or tolerating freethinkers. Its job is to root out and suppress heretics and haters — and to propagate articles of holy faith.

As a result, freedom of conscience and science are under unique attack. Intersectional preference, white privilege, rape culture, disparate impact, equal outcomes, and any number of specious ideas are becoming institutional doctrine.

Tech mogul Tim Gill establishes a $300 million LGBT advocacy foundation “to punish the wicked.” At Google, Danielle Brown, Vice President of Diversity, Integrity and Governance — what an episcopal title, redolent of divine grace — and other corporate officers made it clear after the Damore memorandum that reasonable contestations of the catechism are “not OK,” that is, anathema.

Writing in Psychology Today, Rutgers University psychologist Lee Russim discerns a new McCarthyism in the name of fighting sexism and racism. “I am concerned that such stigma and blacklists will include researchers who study group differences, especially evolutionary or biological bases of group differences [and] anyone who has the temerity to question the wisdom of diversity programs, affirmative action, bias reporting systems, microaggression training, implicit bias training, and the like,” he stated.

He should be worried. A notable University of Pennsylvania law professor recently drew campus-wide rebuke and open condemnation from five colleagues for “assertions of white cultural superiority.” She had openly praised bourgeois ideals of marriage, hard work, patriotism, and good conduct as a superior cultural model and means of reducing social pathology.

“White people are being asked — or pushed — to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more. This is a remarkably bad idea,” Daniel Marcus warned in a prescient 2016 article on white nationalism. “The last thing our society needs is for white people to feel more tribal. The result of this tribalism will not be a catharsis of white identity, improving equality for non-whites. It will be resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.”

It’s not belligerent white trash — yes there is that, sure, if you look for it — but bourgeois, striving “normies” who are tired of scorn and abuse. Americans of all backgrounds would like black America to succeed, but if it can’t, and if it makes their own lives miserable, they won’t take the blame much longer. They’ll find a way of avoiding danger and disorder. It’s that simple.

For diversity’s chaplains, the long game is to render America’s Anglo-European heritage reprehensible and write a new history for themselves. The short game is to get rid of President Trump.

In the post-Charlottesville pile up, it was not enough to say President Trump is a demagogue or public figure unfit for the presidency. He is a racist and Nazi sympathizer. White supremacists are the Administration’s base. Nazis are terrorizing America. New indictments come daily. Blaming Trump for a wave of anti-Semitism might come next.

Parents, taxpayers, and strivers with modest assets and a decent job — many who come from immigrant families — who have overcome poverty and misfortune, resent being the perpetual bad guys in the catechism. It’s little wonder they hope a brassy showman with minimal concept of constitutional government will act as their tribune and redeemer.

For a long time white America went along for the most part with the blame shifting. Millions still remember 2008 promises of racial healing and harmony, and many voted for Barack Obama solely on that account. Look what happened there. They feel conned for a reason.

There are so many ways to earn the priesthood’s wrath. In polite circles, to mention the race-related decay of Detroit, St. Louis, or Baltimore is off limits. You’re the problem, not the solution. Ghetto crime, family collapse, rap filth, or anti-white hatred? Dead silence and uncomfortable looks. Insisting on XX and XY chromosome-based sexuality, you know, male and female? You just don’t get it. Cheap alien labor at the expense of the nation’s native-born? Let’s not go there. Jihad? Africa? Zionism? Well, that does it!

Wasting no time after Charlottesville, high priestess and would-be next president of Harvard University Danielle S. Allen, professor of government and education, heralds the catechism in the Washington Post:

We will forswear violent protest and lock arms across boundaries of difference to revive commitments to nonviolence. We will see the full range of experience in this country — rural, suburban and urban; poor, middling and rich; atheistic, agnostic and faithful; gay, straight and bisexual; male, female and trans; Latino, Asian, white, black, Native American, multiracial and everything in between. Across this full range of American life and its dizzying, dazzling array of intersections, we will find ways to ward off desperation and chaos. Indivisible, we will achieve liberty, justice and dignity for all. Amid unprecedented social heterogeneity, these are the political and social conditions in which free institutions can be revived and endure.

How Prof. Allen? Just how? That’s a neat rhetorical leap from rainbow talk to linking “unprecedented social heterogeneity” and enduring free institutions in your punch line. Since you have insisted elsewhere that Harvard University needs to change its “symbolic repertoire,” erasing its Puritan past, what do you have in mind for the nation, really, underneath these carefully coded words?

Prof. Allen is playing nice, of course, and she’s good at it. But inquisitors lurk in the shadows. Do you not confess to Europe’s 500-year dance macabre and earth rape? Do you not abjure White Christian America and its systemic racism? Shame on you, say the chaplains, throwing up their arms in despair. The Expulsions and Excommunications team arrives from Human Resources, ringing bells, closing books, and blowing out candles.

Security will now escort you out the door.