‘Are we still masters of our own house?’

Abstract Disinformation discourse consists in the deliberate practice of disseminating false information with the intention to deceive. Originating from random fake news spread online by individuals, nowadays it comprises all kinds of content of public interest, importance or urgency, from healthcare to environment to war, communicated by organized groups and, often enough, populist political parties. Using sophisticated techniques of propaganda and threat generation, disinformation discourse is difficult to counter, as it draws upon the current construction of societies, their anxieties and fears, craftily exploiting cases of public distrust in officially circulated information. The aim of this paper is to show that threat-building and fear generation in disinformation discourse often involve the activation of general cognitive schemata that can trigger bipolar conceptualizations, typically the schemata of metaphorization and proximization. I argue that metaphoric as well as proximization based conceptualizations serve to enact virtual US vs. THEM distinctions and make credible and appealing the essentially artificial political differences, divisions and potential antagonisms. The paper investigates the power of such conceptualizations in the discourse of Confederation , a nationalist, radical-right political party in Poland, whose popularity has been on the rise in the past year. It demonstrates how metaphor and proximization are exploited in the disinformation discourse of Confederation aiming at the suspension of support for the war-torn state of Ukraine, on account of its ‘excessive and eventually threatening’ social and (geo)political costs to Poland.