LAST year, when professional surfer Sarah Brady shared text messages she had allegedly received from her former boyfriend, actor Jonah Hill, the internet was abuzz with condemnation of the coercive nature of them.

According to the published communications, Hill outlined his expectations of being in a relationship with Brady, including his need for her to stop surfing with men, as well as diktats on social media use and who she should and should not be spending time with.

These, they said, were his “boundaries,” a therapy term relating to limits we set ourselves on how we are treated by others, not to dictate how others can live their lives.

The preceding decades had certainly brought the benefits of therapy and the means by which we discuss it more firmly into the mainstream. But with that increased spotlight, there has also been an increase in the weaponisation of professional language that has been used to justify behaviour antithetical to its aims. However, this problem extends far beyond therapy speak.

The arena of social justice has also been co-opted by many whose goals are fundamentally rooted in maintaining their power over others.

As with therapy, the language of social justice is mainstream now. A greater understanding of the lives of others has gifted us insight into the layers of intersecting oppressions that exist in our culture. But as with therapy, this has been inverted by groups and activists who have realised that the misuse of terms like misogyny and antisemitism and racism can be a shield to them.

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In anticipation of an expected bad-faith reading of this column, let me emphasise that these prejudices and biases are disgustingly real and present in contemporary Britain. But misuse, both from ignorance and by intent, has muddied the waters and left many uncertain how to talk about these issues without offending.

In other cases, definitions have been stretched so far as to have been broken entirely, leaving headlines and politicians’ speeches far more vague than the wording at first glance suggests.

When I read about rising antisemitism in the news, I’m now left wondering – is the author referencing Britain’s burgeoning far-right extremism that has seen bigots march while chanting: “Jews will not replace us”? Or are we talking about peaceful marches against the genocide in Gaza? When I hear the term misogyny used in the British press, is it in relation to institutional discrimination against women? Or is it being cynically deployed to smear the transgender community for the crime of existing?

When I see the right-wing press suddenly showing a real interest in tackling racism, now I wonder if we are talking about racism at all, or just the attention-seeking whine of a failed white actor in blackface … These are all real, systemic issues in society.

But we are facing a dearth of political literacy when someone protesting the killing of 30,000 Palestinians -– the starvation, the executions, the allegations of ziptied civilians being deliberately crushed by tanks – can be glibly dismissed as being motivated by antisemitism.

It requires the absolute worst-faith interpretation of the motivations to oppose stopping something as horrific as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. But what it does provide, for anyone depraved enough, is a conversation killer that can be cynically weaponised to skirt around accountability.

It is, in many ways, a continuation of the exploitation of minority groups that we have come to expect, a useful deflection that uses our words to maintain the status quo rather than challenge it. The powerful have taken the language that we have built to discuss power structures, and inverted it to re-enforce them.

It reminds me of a time a number of years ago when one columnist tweeted a garbled word salad of terms that, I believe, he thought was a comedic takedown of “woke” language.

But what struck me as being so revealing about his mindset was that each of the phrases and words used had a legitimate meaning behind it, something that would have been clear to anyone who had engaged openly with discussions at the time around Britain’s colonial history.

To him, each turn of phrase was as confusing and meaningless as if a random word generator had spat it out – and in trying to take a swing at this language, he had only highlighted his ignorance on the issue. It seemed such a poignant example of how the media class often speaks with total confidence on issues it doesn’t even remotely understand. And how its ignorance has had a terrible cost.

This inversion or dereliction of meaning is, I believe, the only explanation for why a supposedly grassroots feminist movement against trans people is dominated by misogynistic men, and why groups allegedly against antisemitism have the full support of far-right figures.

A contradiction, no?

Now the UK Government is seemingly preparing to expand its definition of “extremism” through the Prevent scheme to include anti-abortion activists, socialists and communists, buoyed by the framing of peace marchers as antisemites, and antifascists as violent insurrectionists.

Challenging power requires understanding power. That’s true whether we’re talking about Jonah Hill or the British State. We can debate the nuances, yes, but what we can never do is let the language that we use to challenge power, become the language used to protect it.