# Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer is a joke conspiracy theory claiming that Texas senator Ted Cruz is the unidentified serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s. Born on Twitter in 2013 and revived through the 2016 presidential campaign, the gag went from niche shitpost to one of the defining political memes of the decade, eventually acknowledged by Cruz himself. ## Origin The earliest known post is a March 14, 2013 tweet from the account @RedPillAmerica during CPAC, which joked that Cruz's upcoming speech was titled "This Is The Zodiac Speaking"[2]. The tweet drew on a phrase the real Zodiac Killer used to open his letters to the press, and it sat quietly for over a year before other accounts started building on it. On November 10, 2014, Twitter user @Flash2844 posted that Cruz's deathbed confession would be "I am the Zodiac Killer," attaching the hashtag #TedCruzIsTheZodiacKiller and giving the joke a searchable label[7]. From there it stayed as a low-level Twitter in-joke through most of 2015, waiting for Cruz's presidential run to give it a wider audience. - **Platform:** Twitter (origin) / Facebook, Reddit (viral spread) - **Creator:** @RedPillAmerica (earliest known poster) - **Date:** 2013 ## Overview Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer is a running political joke that Texas senator Ted Cruz is secretly the Zodiac Killer, the unidentified murderer who killed at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968 and 1969 and taunted police with cryptic ciphers[3]. The bit is deliberately absurd, everyone repeating it knows Cruz was born in 1970, which makes the accusation physically impossible[3]. That impossibility is part of the joke's charm, the whole thing is a shitpost dressed up as a criminal investigation. The humor works on two levels. The surface layer plays the theory straight, complete with fake deathbed confessions, evidence boards, and puns like the claim that the Zodiac's first victims were named "Cal and Gary" because Cruz was born in Calgary[1]. The subtext, spelled out by a Verge writer in 2017, is that the meme caught on because a lot of people think Cruz is "loathsome enough to murder people" and the format lets them say so through a joke[6]. NPR interviewed several of the accounts pushing the bit in early 2016 and found the same undercurrent, most of them just said they found Cruz "creepy"[3]. By 2016 the joke reached escape velocity. Google's autocomplete filled in "Is Ted Cruz the Zodiac killer?" before you finished typing his name[3], a Facebook page racked up thousands of likes[8], and a comedian roasted Cruz with it at the White House Correspondents' Dinner[3]. A year later Cruz himself tweeted a picture of a Zodiac cipher in response to another senator, effectively canonizing the joke from inside the Senate[6]. ## How to Use The format is loose. Most versions treat the accusation as settled fact and then either invent "evidence" (fake quotes, doctored maps, puns on Cruz's birthplace) or drop the line into unrelated conversations about Cruz as a punchline. A common convention is to write it as a hashtag or Google search suggestion, playing on the Google autocomplete result that briefly surfaced during the 2016 primary[3]. Cruz himself demonstrated the deadpan version in 2017 by tweeting the Zodiac's cipher with no caption, letting the image do the joke[5]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer? A long-running Twitter joke claiming senator Ted Cruz is the unidentified Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer active in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969[3]. ### Where did Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer come from? The earliest known post is a March 14, 2013 tweet from @RedPillAmerica riffing on the Zodiac's letter opener "This Is The Zodiac Speaking"[2]. ### What does Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer mean? Not much literally, Cruz was born in 1970 and could not be the killer[3]. It's a coded way for Cruz's critics to call him creepy, which several of the meme's early boosters told NPR outright[3]. ### How do you use Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer? People typically state the accusation as fact and add fake evidence, puns like the Calgary / "Cal and Gary" bit, or images of the Zodiac's ciphers[1][5]. ### Is Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer still popular? It's a classic political meme that peaked around the 2016 election and Cruz's 2017 cipher tweet[6], and it's still referenced any time Cruz trends. ### Did Ted Cruz respond to the Zodiac Killer meme? Yes. On October 18, 2017, Cruz tweeted an image of the Zodiac Killer's cipher without comment in reply to senator Ben Sasse, and the tweet drew more than 47,000 retweets in a day[5][9]. ### Why did the meme catch on in 2016? A February 13, 2016 push by @vrunt got the phrase onto Google Trends and briefly onto CBS's Republican debate coverage[1], and mainstream outlets like NPR and The Verge covered it days later[3][4]. ### What's the Calgary joke about? On January 20, 2016, @ZeppoWilbury tweeted that Cruz was born in Calgary and that the Zodiac's first victims were named "Cal and Gary," a fake pun that became one of the joke's signature lines[1]. ### Did Ted Cruz's wife address the meme? Yahoo News asked Heidi Cruz about Larry Wilmore's Correspondents' Dinner jokes in May 2016. She said she'd been married to him for 15 years and it didn't bother her at all[3]. ### Did any comedians push the joke on TV? Larry Wilmore repeatedly called Cruz the Zodiac Killer during his closing set at the April 30, 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner[3]. ## References 1. [https://twitter.com/vrunt/status/698716876059316224]() 2. [https://twitter.com/RedPillAmerica/status/312323787091755009]() 3. [https://www.npr.org/2016/02/26/468153952/-memeoftheweek-ted-cruz-and-the-zodiac-killer]() 4. [https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/26/11120000/ted-cruz-zodiac-killer-why-evidence-theory]() 5. [https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/920709146789515272]() 6. [https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/18/16499058/ted-cruz-zodiac-killer-meme-twitter-joke]() 7. [https://twitter.com/Flash2844/status/531875126212849666]() 8. [https://www.facebook.com/TedCruzIsTheZodiacKiller/]() 9. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ted-cruz-zodiac-killer]() 10. [https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/779qlz/ted_cruz_tweets_zodiac_killer_confession/]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/ted-cruz-zodiac-killer Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library