The last 24 hours of Charlie Kirk’s life revealed a side of him that even his fiercest critics now say deserves to be remembered.
The day before his assassination, Kirk privately reached out to CNN commentator Van Jones with an invitation for dialogue.
“Hey Van, I mean it, I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.”
That message, sent on September 9, was never answered. Kirk was murdered the following day. Jones admitted he did not even see the note until after news of Kirk’s death spread.
In his own post on X, Jones reflected:
“The day before he was horrifically murdered, Charlie Kirk sent me a direct message on X. Unfortunately, before I could even respond, Charlie Kirk was killed — seemingly assassinated for the words he’d spoken.I’ve taken issue with many of those words — sometimes strongly — but never his right to speak them. Never his right to express those views and then go home to his family. That is a sacred American value.Kirk’s murder gives us all reason to come back to the table for dialogue. There is a rising tide of political violence that has already swept away his life and many others’ lives, from both the Left and the Right.Violence like this should compel people in both parties to turn down the heat, seek common ground and look for off-ramps from the vitriol — as Kirk was doing with me, the day before he died.We can choose to go the way of more violence, more outrage and more censorship — if we want to. But if we choose censorship and civil war, we cannot blame that choice on Charlie Kirk! From his last 24 hours, I have the proof that he wanted to go a very different way.”
Jones later sat down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper to explain how the private message reshaped his own view of Kirk’s final hours. Their conversation revealed the context of Kirk’s outreach and why Jones felt compelled to share it publicly now.
Full Transcript of Van Jones Interview
ANDERSON COOPER: “The story begins when a Ukrainian woman was fatally stabbed last month in North Carolina, the suspect is a black man, and Charlie Kirk and you got into a public sparring match online. Kirk claimed the murder happened because she was white. You denounced that as completely unfounded. He then sent out what you call a fire hose of tweets challenging his argument, which you say sparked death threats against you. In the midst of all of this, Kirk reached out to you in a direct message on X:‘Hey Van, I mean it. I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman, as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.’That message was sent on September 9. You’ve said you did not see it until the very next day, after Kirk was murdered. You just wrote a piece about this for CNN.com, and you’re here tonight. I mean, this is extraordinary. So this was received the day before he was killed?”VAN JONES: “Yeah, look. I mean, we were beefing. We were going at it online, on air, and then after he died, after he was murdered. My team called and said, ‘Van, he was trying to reach you.’ Man, what was he doing?”“Dialogue. Let’s be gentlemen together.“He says, ‘Let’s disagree agreeably.’ So I’m sitting on this and I’m watching the whole country talk about Civil War, censorship, justifying murder, about this guy.”“This guy is reaching out to his mortal enemy, saying we need to be gentlemen, sit down together and disagree agreeably, and the next day, he’s killed. And I’ve sat on it long enough, and I just said, you know, we’re going to memorialize this man.”“We disagreed. Everybody knows we were not friends, okay, at all. But you praise the good when it’s time to memorialize somebody. And what he did, and I didn’t even know it was good, he was not for censorship, he was not for Civil War. He was not for violence. He was for dialogue, open debate, and dialogue, even with me; even with me.”
Kirk’s final gesture was not a call for more division but an appeal to talk, even with someone he had clashed with bitterly. Van Jones himself, who sparred publicly with Kirk, now memorializes him for that outreach.
In the end, Kirk’s last act was not anger, but an invitation: “Let’s disagree agreeably.”
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