I must admit that I’ve often been green—at least metaphorically. Between my vulnerability to motion sickness and two nine-month-long bouts of morning sickness with my two pregnancies, I’ve easily fallen into the metaphor of “being green about the gills” or “turning green” or some other expression for nausea. However, I am not actually green, nor is any other human being on planet Earth.

That reality—people aren’t green—didn’t stop the British Board of Film Classification from preparing an exceptionally strange warning for people in the United Kingdom planning on checking out “Wicked,” a movie based on the long-running musical which is, in turn, based upon the book of the same name. All are politically correct because they turn traditional good guys into bad guys and vice versa, starting with the evil Wicked Witch of the West, who is the book’s/musical’s/movie’s heroine.

Image by AI.

However, even Gregory Maguire, the gay man behind Wicked, couldn’t have imagined how far the Western madness of attacking cultural icons would take him. In Not-So-Great Britain, TMZ reports, the movie’s official “trigger warning” was so poorly written that it appears to warn Brits not to be mean to green people and imaginary animals:

A trigger warning about "Wicked" has people in a tornado-like rage ... with many decrying the warning about discrimination against people with green skin.

Here’s the deal ... the British Board of Film Classification reviews movies with a set of criteria -- telling parents if there is nudity, violence, injuries -- and, discrimination, among other categories.

For “Wicked,” the section reads “A green-skinned woman is mocked, bullied and humiliated because of her skin color. A disabled woman in a wheelchair is treated in a condescending manner by able-bodied people. Talking animals are persecuted in a fantastical society.”

Naturally and appropriately, social media lambasted this warning:

Trigger Warning: Green Skin?

We’ve reached peak absurdity. The Wicked musical now comes with a trigger warning for Elphaba’s green skin. Apparently, the fictional pigmentation of a made-up witch might offend someone, somewhere.

This isn’t “inclusivity”; it’s infantilisation. Are we really so fragile that even fantasy requires a health and safety label? What’s next? A trigger warning for blue skies in case someone’s favourite colour is red?

This isn’t progress—it’s a parody of it. We need resilient minds, not bubble-wrapped sensitivities.

The world has officially gone mad the @BBFC has issued a trigger warning about the Green Witch in Wicked due to discrimination she suffered as a green skinned mythical character!!!! #Wicked pic.twitter.com/IJMP9ZT8AZ

— add more Chillies (@addmoreChillies) November 28, 2024

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) slapped a "Discrimination" trigger warning on Wicked for "A green-skinned woman is mocked, bullied and humiliated because of her skin colour. ... Talking animals are persecuted in a fantastical society." You can't make this up! pic.twitter.com/2Qh4PiPAJo

— Dirk Lammerts (@dlammerts) November 29, 2024

Leftists, of course, weren’t going to take attacks on their bizarre shibboleths lying down. Britain’s reliably leftist Guardian sprang into the breach, where the author opted for some heavy-handed humor purportedly supporting those who poked fun at the trigger warning before getting to his real point:

Oh sure, there will be some who will claim that this sort of thing is literally the BBFC’s job, one it performs for most major releases, and all the post was doing was highlighting the sort of complex discussions about content and subtext that go into awarding a film with a classification. Indeed, some people might even argue that Elphaba’s skin colour is an allegory for any form of racism – in fact an allegory that if anything is a little too heavy-handed – and that the organisation had a moral duty to explain that these depictions of racist abuse are what landed Wicked with a PG certificate rather than a U.

But that would be political correctness gone mad, wouldn’t it. We shouldn’t have to put up with trigger warnings, even on films that have been heavily marketed for children despite being based on revisionist novels that contain several scenes set in BDSM clubs. Children need to learn that racism and animal abuse happens every day. They should be subjected to depictions of this without warning, especially if they’re five years old and just want to watch a nice fairytale movie with lots of lovely songs in it.

In short, you cannot traumatise a child enough, and that’s why it’s clear that the real villain of this story is a polite little notice that someone put up on a website. How dare they.

Once upon a time, Britain was a colossus astride the world. You can take umbrage at the fact that it did colonization better than other nations (including the nations it colonized, who would have been happy to do the same if they’d had the ability), but you cannot delay that Britain was a robust culture that believed in itself and its values, and that was geared to producing physically and emotionally robust people. Leftism, however, has colonized Britain and utterly destroyed its national strength and character—and so parents need to steel their children against the horrors of anti-green discrimination.

It’s all so very sad...