Cowards flinched and traitors sneered. Pundits (in the UK and over here) mined a seemingly inexhaustible supply of smugness. The baronial press was a collective Cassandra.

Jeremy Corbyn? An old, rumpled, past-it relic, with cartoonish ideas and an awkward presence, who couldn’t even keep his own caucus in line. Washed up. A spike driven through the heart of the Labour Party.

Google “historic defeat” and “labour,” referring both to a by-election this past February and to prognostications for yesterday’s election. How the squalid media monkeys loved that phrase. Historic defeat. I can’t help repeating it, over and over, like a mantra. Last night I certainly watched an historic defeat. Austerity. Blairism. The phrase “dustbin of history” comes to mind.

Labour’s over-all vote share rose by 10%. For all of the salacious talk of Labour “anti-Semitism,” Corbyn increased his vote share in the so-called “bagel belt” of Finchley and Golders Green, Hendon and Chipping Barnet by 4%, 4.2% and 11% respectively, over his Jewish predecessor, Ed Miliband. Whoops! But the pundits, spinning like dreidels, claim he “faltered” there. (Google “Corbyn” and “faltered.”)

Corbyn himself was elected for the ninth time, with an “historic” vote in his constituency, the largest any candidate has ever achieved. “Safe” seats?” I’ll see your Copeland and raise you Canterbury, Tory for a century. He “defied the polls,” we are told—another punditish cop-out phrase I adore.

Just watch the pundits now. “Labour would have had a majority if not for Jeremy Corbyn” is the new flavour. One’s jaw drops at the sheer shamelessness of it.

Historic defeat there was. Of cynicism, distortions, spin, smears and outright lies. Of smirking scribblers whose brows have never been furrowed with unconventional thoughts. Of political opportunists in the Labour Party whose knives were always out when the leader’s back was turned. Of the Tory “vision” of incessant austerity for all but the rulers. And of that ruling class who gave all this breath and life.

Theresa May won the election, but lost. Jeremy Corbyn lost the election but won. An extraordinary number of “woke” voters somehow saw through the incessant poisonous fog of journalistic propaganda. Those numbers can only increase—the snowball effect—now that Corbyn has seized the time. I, for one, can’t wait for his next “historic defeat.”