General Hospital Star Sparks Firestorm With Candid Reaction to Charlie Kirk Tragedy
Daytime drama met real-life controversy as a General Hospital alum broke their silence online about the shocking campus shooting and Charlie Kirk’s death—setting off a storm across social media.
This is one of those stories where daytime TV, politics, and social media collide, and it gets messy fast. A high-profile conservative figure is reported dead after a campus shooting, and a General Hospital alum is sounding off about it online.
What happened, as it’s being reported
According to widespread reports, Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk was shot while on stage at Utah Valley University during a TPUSA event on September 10, 2025. The reports say he was struck in the neck and died. Kirk co-founded TPUSA in 2013 and also served as CEO of Turning Point Action.
The soap star weighing in
Actor Ingo Rademacher, best known to soap fans as Jasper 'Jax' Jacks on General Hospital and Thorne Forrester on The Bold and the Beautiful, jumped on Instagram with a video and a long caption about the news. If you remember, he’s been outspoken for years; he even sued ABC in 2021 over the network’s vaccine mandate tied to his GH exit.
What Rademacher said (and how blunt it got)
Rademacher’s video called out people he says celebrated Kirk’s death online. He framed Kirk as someone who pushed for free speech and independent thinking, and argued that folks who are against open debate aren’t really participating in society. He also imagined what would happen if people on the right stopped talking to people on the left altogether, adding that he thinks the opposite has already happened. Bottom line, he said he’s angry and sad about the situation and wants more transparency and open debate.
- He criticized reactions online from people he says were 'happy' about the news.
- He said the temperature of political rhetoric has gotten too high and blamed that for where we are.
- He mentioned the recent assassination attempt against President Donald Trump as part of that same escalation.
- He closed by saying he isn’t sure where things go from here.
'Y'all on the left are violent. You don't respect any form of debate or free speech. Some of you even celebrate when somebody on the right dies and put that shit on social media.'
'Charlie is dead because of the constant rhetoric of calling people on the right Nazis and fascist and every other disgusting name under the sun. You call yourselves liberal and progressives, but you don't even know what that means anymore.'
'Nobody on the left posted anything to turn down the heat. Y'all all just stayed quiet. Of course, some of you nut jobs celebrated. I don't know where we go from here.'
The bigger picture
The reaction to Kirk’s reported death has been all over the map, and Rademacher’s post is a good example of how quickly the conversation jumps from grief to the broader fight over speech, labels, and who’s to blame for the temperature online. It’s also a very inside-baseball moment for soap watchers: not every former daytime leading man wades into this territory, but Rademacher has never exactly been shy about his views.