During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, opponents of Texas Senator Ted Cruz popularized a deliberately absurd joke on Twitter claiming that Cruz was the Zodiac Killer. The claim is plainly impossible — Cruz was born in 1970, the year after the last confirmed Zodiac-related killing — and participants openly acknowledged it was not meant to be believed.
A February 2016 Public Policy Polling survey of Florida voters found that 10% of respondents said they believed Cruz was the killer, while 28% said the possibility could not be ruled out. Several people involved told NPR they understood the joke was false, framing it as being “all about a feeling they have about Cruz.” An SF Weekly columnist described the meme’s persistence as “a matter of style over substance.”
Cruz himself engaged with the joke, tweeting an image of one of the killer’s coded messages in October 2017, and again responding to the meme in 2020 after the decryption of a previously unsolved Zodiac letter.
The meme is satire; it carries no evidentiary value regarding the case and is documented here only as a cultural phenomenon.