In the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk's assassination last week, many liberal media pundits have ignored the man's entire body of work to falsely smear him as a hateful bigot and racist who was uninterested in hearing any counterarguments to his positions on the issues.

At least one pundit on the left has bucked that narrative, though, as CNN analyst Van Jones just shared a private message he'd received from Kirk one day before he was murdered, which sought to arrange a civil debate between them on the issue of crime and race, according to the New York Post.

An admittedly "shocked" Jones acknowledged that the message altered his perception of Kirk and confirmed what many Americans already knew -- that Kirk abhorred political violence, hatred, and censorship, and was always interested in having peaceful conversations and dialogue with anybody willing to engage civilly.

Kirk reached out to Jones for a civil debate

In an Instagram post on Saturday, Jones announced that he'd decided to share "something personal" that he believed was "important" for everyone to understand -- the personal message he'd received from Kirk one day before he was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University.

"Charlie Kirk and I were not friends. At all," Jones said, and noted that they'd been "beefing hard," online and on air, over the final week of Kirk's life, about the racial aspect of a recent high-profile stabbing murder on a train in North Carolina that had been caught on video.

"But the day before he died, he did something that shocked me," the CNN analyst continued. "He sent me a personal message calling for personal dialogue. He wanted me to come on his show. He said, we can be gentlemen together. He said we could deal with our disagreements agreeably."

"And for the past week and a half, just watching people talk about civil wars and censorship and all this stuff coming out of his death, I just thought it was important to let people know -- don’t put that on Charlie Kirk," Jones asserted. "Because the last day of his life, he was reaching out to have not more censorship, [but] more conversation, more dialogue, with somebody who, honestly, was one of his adversaries -- me."

He added that he'd decided to share that in the hope that it "might help somebody, on both sides, deal with issues more like he did."

Kirk's final message to Jones

In addition to the short video on Instagram, Jones also published an op-ed for CNN to more fully express his thoughts about the private message he's received from Kirk on the day before his horrific assassination by somebody who disagreed vehemently with his views.

Kirk's "surprising" message to Jones read, "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."

Unfortunately, Kirk was murdered "for the words he's spoken" before Jones could respond and take him up on the offer for a debate on Kirk's podcast, and Jones wrote, "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 would not approve of the violence, outrage, and censorship

Jones went on to reshare his initial and unequivocal condemnation of Kirk's murder and decried the increasing trend of political violence in America, and said, "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."

He lauded Kirk as "one of the best debaters and organizers of our age," and expressed his prior desire to defeat Kirk intellectually and politically, but acknowledged, "Unfortunately, a coward’s bullet robbed conservatives of a rising talent, progressives of a worthy opponent, and a family of a loving father."

"In the wake of that murder, Americans have a choice to make. We can choose to go the way of more violence, more outrage, and more censorship -- if we want to," Jones concluded. "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."