Ann Coulter tweeted a “column” (I have decided to follow this new trend of putting things in quotes for no reason)

They are commonly called “scare quotes”, and are by no means new.

According to Wikipedia:

The term “scare quotes” as it refers to the punctuation marks was coined in 1956 by G. E. M. Anscombe in an essay “Aristotle and the Sea Battle” published in Mind; a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy.