conflate

verb

1. To combine or mix together.
2. (broadly)To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.

   ““Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.””

3. (broadly)To deliberately draw a false equivalence or association, typically in a tacit or implicit manner as propaganda and/or an intentional distortion or misrepresentation of the subject matter.

   “But in reality, the order simply furthers the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies by continuing to conflate immigration issues with criminal ones.”

   “But again, this conflates global geographic variation with race, says Alan Goodman, a biological anthropologist at Hampshire College.”

   “Climate skeptics have conflated the two for years, for example, pointing to cold winter weather as proof that global warming is a hoax, most likely to play on people’s confusion about the two.”

   ““We must stop conflating selectivity with excellence. We must stop correlating prestige with privilege,” he said.”

adj

1. (not-comparable)Combining elements from multiple versions of the same text.

   “Why the redactor created this conflate version, despite its inconsistencies, is a matter of conjecture.”

noun

1. A conflate text, one which conflates multiple version of a text together.