EXCLUSIVE–Journalist Hoping for John McCain’s Death: ‘I Stand by What I Wrote’

The self-described “rogue journalist” who wished John McCain dead on Monday explains to Breitbart News that she sticks by her story in the aftermath of the Arizona senator publicizing his brain-cancer diagnosis on Wednesday.

“I stand by what I wrote,” Caitlin Johnstone tells Breitbart News.

The Australian writer posted a piece called “Please Just F—ing Die Already” on Medium.com on Monday.

The former prisoner of war underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from behind his left eye three days earlier on Friday. On Wednesday, McCain revealed a brain-tumor diagnosis. Glioblastoma, the specific type of cancer, kills about 96 percent of the men between 55 and 64 that it afflicts within five years. John McCain turns 81 in late August.

Johnstone maintains that her prolonged social-media silence that followed news of the grim diagnosis came as a coincidence.

“I was on a day trip with my husband,” she explains. “As you know I’m in Australia, and by the time we got home and read the news most of the Americans were asleep.”

She followed up the uncharacteristic hush with a bombastic die-real-soon convalescence card. “John McCain has cancer,” she wrote Thursday. “Good.”

The words followed a GIF showing the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz singing “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead.”

“John McCain loves death, and very soon he will get his wish,” Johnstone writes Thursday. “McCain has spent his political career pushing for the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. I simply hope that stops. Why would anyone pray for that to continue? Why would you wish health and recovery for that? Why would you offer your lifeforce for this agent of death to continue his grisly work?”

Johnstone titled the Thursday piece “Good.”

She cites the 2008 Republican presidential nominee’s support of various military interventions as the rationale for the deathwish.

Johnstone notes that her initial post generated a glut of polarizing responses from readers.

“As is becoming the norm for my work the reaction was largely positive from the anti-establishment right and the anti-establishment left,” she informs Breitbart News, “and extremely negative from Republican and Democrat establishment loyalists.”