conflate

1. (by extension) To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to mistakenly treat (them) as equivalent.Examples: "“Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and the first European to experiment with gunpowder.” — “No, you are conflating Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon.”"Synonyms: confuse, mix up, lump togetherbroadly

2. (by extension) 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.Examples: "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."broadly