Good post. The phrase itself has become a smear campaign. Anything they don't want said, they will begin to associate with that term. It's exactly a thought terminating cliche, as you said.

I've began using the term "collusion" instead of "conspiracy" because usually that's what I'm referring to. And I use the term hypothesis instead of theory, because that's usually what it is. I even made /r/collusion and /r/collusionhypothesis for the purposes of getting away from this intentionally-soiled term.

Another interesting tidbit is that the CIA program to do this through the media was created right after the JFK assassination.