There has been a lot written about the systematic way that right-wing politicians pick emotional and misleading formulations to advance their agenda, most famously things like "death tax" and "USA PATRIOT Act." However these formulations have been carefully devised by think tanks to appeal to win over people not already on the side of the person using them.
This first phase of the War on Language was despicable and dishonest, but at least effective at advancing right-wing policy agendas. More recently, we seem to have entered a second, much stupider phase, where right-wing politicians and pundits coin new terms intended to inflame the base, but which require elaborate rationales to explain because at first, second, and nine-thousandth glance, they seem stupid rather than immediately compelling.
The first example I saw of this was Republican pundits saying that "Democrat" should be used instead of "Democratic," because in their obstruction of the rightfully-elected president W., the Democrats were anti-democratic. Even if their reasoning were true and the strategy made sense, it was inconsistently applied; they never called for North Korea to be referred to as "The Democrat People's Republic of Korea." But as stupid as this use still seems to me, it was widely adopted by Republic writers and has also been adopted by non-Republic writers who are exposed to lots of Republics, which revealed another flaw in the strategy. In the process of adoption, the pejorative sense seems to have been mostly erased, because it required explaining to be pejorative in the first place.
I was then introduced to "homicide bombers," supposedly as a way of drawing attention away from the terrorists who commit suicide bombings. However suicide is the distinguishing feature of suicide bombings; in many cases they are the only fatality of the attack.
Now I have just encountered an even more ridiculous example in The Federalist, which has apparently coined the term "psychological terrorism," to describe the allegations against Kavanaugh. Quite apart from the conspiracy theory implied, this formulation has two linguistic problems. Firstly, it expands the definition of "terrorism", so that physical harm, the threat of physical harm, destruction of property with a reckless regard for the chance of physical harm is no longer required: the far-right apparently wants to expand the concept of "terrorism" in the same way that Catherine McKinnon tried to expand the concept of violence. But secondly, it is is entirely redundant, since terrorism is by definition a form of psychological warfare.
I considered posting about this on the Kavanaugh thread, but somehow I feel like I may be seeing similar attacks against language in the near future, and want to record them in one place.