Van Jones Says He Was Getting ‘Racist Death Threats’ When Charlie Kirk Reached Out For a ‘Civil Debate’

CNN’s Van Jones said he received a surprising text from Charlie Kirk the day before the Turning Point USA founder was shot dead while speaking on a college campus.

Jones recounted the story to CNN host Boris Sanchez on Saturday.

“Charlie Kirk and I were not friends. We did not agree on anything,” Jones began. “And that last week of his life, we were really going at each other over what happened with the Ukrainian woman who was murdered.”

Jones was referring to the brutal stabbing death of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August; surveillance footage of the killing went viral on X earlier this month.

“And so the last thing I expected was to hear from him,” Jones said. “In fact, we were trying to deal with the wave of death threats and racial stuff that was coming at me in the middle of that controversy when my team called and said that he had been shot. So, that was the opposite of what anybody wanted. And we immediately denounced that killing.”

Jones continued:

But it was the next day when suddenly my team called back and said, Charlie Kirk was trying to reach you the day before he died. I was like, “What?” He was trying to reach you. He had sent you a message. And so I saw the message. And it was a message saying, “Let’s talk about this civilly…Come on my show. Let’s be gentlemen.” And he said, “Let’s disagree agreeably.”

And, you know, this is a weekend to kind of praise the good in Charlie Kirk. There’s going to be a long conversation about his exact role in the things…that he’s done that people do not like. But I thought it was important to put that into the public record, that for all the talk now about censorship, he wasn’t trying to censor me. He wasn’t saying I shouldn’t have a show. He was saying, “Come on my show.” For all the talk of civil war, he wasn’t talking about violence. He was talking about conversation.

Jones added, “I was the recipient myself of pretty caustic language from Charlie Kirk. And unfortunately, a lot of his followers were even worse than that. Frankly, much worse, including racist death threats…But when I saw that message, I thought it was important to put it in the record that he was not calling for Van Jones to be taken off the air. He was not calling for van Jones to be fired. As someone who disagreed with him on the public airwaves, he was calling for me to come to have a bigger platform.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.