As you have heard me explain on The Megyn Kelly Show, I think Van Jones has been extremely cowardly in his response to the Charlie Kirk situation.
Two days before Charlie was murdered, he called him a racist on CNN based on nothing. Van Jones had his facts wrong. Charlie made a comment that there was a racial element to the slaying of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Van apparently hadn’t done his homework and hadn’t heard that the black man who killed the white woman said, ‘I got that white girl,’ after the stabbing.
The Backstory
If you were Van Jones and honorable, what would you do – especially after Charlie had been killed? You would say, ‘I am so sorry.’
Just to be clear, I don’t blame Van Jones for Charlie’s murder. He doesn’t need to apologize for Charlie’s murder. But for calling him a racist two nights before that he was assassinated? Yeah, he should apologize for that – with or without the murder – because it was a smear and it was wrong. It was based on erroneous facts. As somebody who works in news, you have to come out and say, ‘I was wrong. I didn’t know about what that black man had said, and I apologize to Charlie for saying something about him that has no basis in fact.’
He wouldn’t. Instead, he wanted credit for outing Charlie for doing a nice thing because Charlie had reached out to him on X and said,’ Hey, let’s have a good faith debate as men.’ And Van Jones didn’t get back to him. He wants us to believe that he didn’t know about it until after Charlie died (I don’t believe that either – I have my reasons).
Now, he is continuing on this grift of trying to look like somebody who is going to uphold Charlie’s legacy; he is going to be the ‘good guy’ by saying a couple of nice things about Charlie after he was killed. Meanwhile, the story is actually that he is a bad guy for smearing Charlie as a racist while he was alive, and causing him strife in the last 48 hours of his life, and then not owning up to his erroneous smear when it was clear to everybody that’s what it was.
Jones on Maher
So, he went on Bill Maher’s show Friday night, and Bill gave him the benefit of the doubt. He said he bet he would have “agreed to debate Charlie Kirk” because “that’s the kind of guy you are” – even though Van was already on the record as having said he would not have done it because he “wasn’t trying to build his platform.”
With that in mind, take a look at how the exchange between Maher and Jones went:
MAHER: Would you have agreed to debate Charlie Kirk? I bet you I know the answer, and I bet you the answer is yes because that’s the kind of guy you are.
JONES: Yeah. Listen, Charlie Kirk and I were not friends, and we were in a big, big public fight the week that he died. And it turned out that the day before he died, he sent me a personal message wanting me to come on his show, and he said, ‘Let’s be gentlemen.’ He said, ‘Let’s disagree agreeably’… I’m going to carry those words with me because he was a words, not weapons Guy. I disagree with his words. He’s a words not weapons Guy, and we’re getting away from that now. And I was very frustrated at people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried, blood still on the widow’s shoes, and people want to post every dumb thing he ever said. He was a 31-year-old kid. If you got me at 31 years old, I was on the left side of Pluto. There is no telling what you have had me saying, so let’s get some grace and some space even to our enemies or adversaries.
He should have stopped after the words “widow’s shoes” and we would have had no problem with what he said there other than what I already outlined. Instead, he had to go on to say “this is a 31-year-old kid.” It is pejorative. He is trying to put Charlie down. He is trying to diminish him. This is classic Van Jones, trying to act like he is this person giving grace when what he is actually doing is insulting Charlie.
Thirty-one years old is not a kid. Most of our Founding Fathers were younger than that when they drafted our founding documents. Charlie lived a life just like those Founders. Charlie was self-educated. Charlie was a man of the world. Charlie spent his life in ‘flyover country’ trying to understand the issues that were affecting actual Americans. Charlie was a far more articulate spokesperson for the causes he believed in than Van Jones could ever hope to be. Ever.
They weren’t errant, stupid tweets by a kid that the left was freaking out about. They were thoughtful policy positions as a grown man that Charlie professed that most of us on the right wholeheartedly agree with. It was their cause to diminish them or him. It is truly part of an ongoing smear campaign, but Van Jones is more clever about it than Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Megyn’s Message
To me, it is infuriating. Charlie was not some kid. He did not need Van Jones to run cover for him on his tweets.
Van Jones, just stop talking about Charlie Kirk unless you are going to say you apologize. I don’t want to hear from you anymore, and I am pretty sure I speak for most of the right-wing on that. Just stop it.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,166 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.