Conflate
Etymology
From Latin “conflare,” to blow together or fuse, from “com-” (together) and “flare,” to blow. The original was metallurgical: melting separate metals into one mass. The modern use keeps the fusion but adds a criticism — the things melted together should have been kept apart.
verb · /kuhn-FLAYT/
To treat two distinct things as if they were one, blurring a real difference.
What it names
A common reasoning error precisely — not confusing two things by accident, but merging them into a single blurred idea.
Example
Critics conflate disagreeing with a policy and hating the people it helps, as if the two were the same.
Related idea
To conflate is to fuse two ideas that differ; to parse is to separate what has been run together. The careful thinker parses where the careless one conflates.