'Semi' seems to be a qualifier which lends spurious credibility to the outrageous misuse of the term 'Fascist.' For example, if you called someone a 'giraffe' that would be obviously ridiculous, but if you said 'semi giraffe' that would cause people to pause for thought in case they had missed something.
George Orwell wrote about the multifarious misuses of the word 'Fascist' as long ago as 1944, and it has only gotten crazier since. If the term, or at least its common usage, has any residual meaning, it is not as a noun or an adjective, but as a word that performs an action: it brands people as being outside the scope of human sympathy, making them targets for violence. There are other words like that, notably terms of racial abuse.
'Semi' seems to be a qualifier which lends spurious credibility to the outrageous misuse of the term 'Fascist.' For example, if you called someone a 'giraffe' that would be obviously ridiculous, but if you said 'semi giraffe' that would cause people to pause for thought in case they had missed something.
George Orwell wrote about the multifarious misuses of the word 'Fascist' as long ago as 1944, and it has only gotten crazier since. If the term, or at least its common usage, has any residual meaning, it is not as a noun or an adjective, but as a word that performs an action: it brands people as being outside the scope of human sympathy, making them targets for violence. There are other words like that, notably terms of racial abuse.