In each edition of web_crawlr we have exclusive original content every day. On Saturday our Video Producer Kyle Calise explores the origins and history of the most iconic memes online in his “Meme History” column. If you want to read columns like this a day before everyone else, subscribe to web_crawlr to get your daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
As far as we can tell, no one has actually seen Ted Cruz and the Zodiac Killer in the same place at the same time.
The Zodiac Killer was an unidentified serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least five people in the late ‘60s. Never caught, he teased law enforcement and the world writ large with cryptic drawings, letters, and ciphers often mailed to news outlets. Over the years, he was the subject of numerous books, movies, and then… memes.
Memes begin at CPAC 2013
On March 16th, 2013, Ted Cruz gave a speech at that year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, and in the leadup, a tweet from @RedPillAmerica joked that it would be titled “This is the Zodiac Speaking”—which is a reference to the famous letters from the actual murderer.
The following year, another tweet predicted that it would be his deathbed confession.
The year after that, a Facebook page was launched. It served as a mecca and rallying place for anyone online who hated Ted Cruz (or just thought it was funny) to contribute their own image macro or conspiracy theory.
‘Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer’ at a presidential debate
Then came that cycle’s ninth Republican presidential debate.
On February 13th, 2016, CBS tried a new thing, which was to overlay trending Google searches related to the candidates in a lower third onscreen. Twitter user @vrunt called for as many people as possible to Google “ted cruz is the zodiac killer” in an attempt to appear onscreen.
It…didn’t, but it was worth some laughs, and also lent the meme enough visibility to become as mainstream as it was ever going to get. That month, T-shirts went on sale depicting the senator as the Zodiac Killer (all proceeds going toward the West Fund, which provides funding and support for abortion services in Texas), and major news outlets began publishing stories on the conspiracy theory.
It was so popular that a poll released later that month showed that a whopping 10% of respondents actually believed he is the Zodiac Killer, and at that spring’s White House Correspondents’ dinner, Larry Willmore repeatedly referred to the meme.
A conspiracy theory within a conspiracy theory
If you want a conspiracy within a conspiracy, it appears that around that time, the idea of Ted Cruz being the Zodiac Killer got so popular that Google itself tried to clamp down on it.
At first, if a user had typed “is ted cruz…” into Google’s search bar it would have autosuggested “the zodiac killer.” But by April, that autosuggestion had gone away, despite the meme’s popularity, and despite search interest for “ted cruz zodiac killer” remaining high.
This popularity is something that anyone online would have had to acknowledge back in the day, even without looking at the data. Because it seemed like every time there was a story about Ted Cruz and him doing something even mildly sketchy, weird, or Machiavellian—which was often—people responded with Zodiac Killer jokes. When, years later, Fox News reported that the actual Zodiac Killer had been positively ID’d, the joke still didn’t die.
Ted Cruz: Serial meme killer
Ironically, what that took was Ted Cruz himself participating. In pretending to take credit for being the killer, he actually killed the meme itself.
In 2016, Donald Trump accused Cruz’s dad of killing John F. Kennedy. But rather than distancing himself from the weirdness, when, unrelatedly, Ben Sasse apologized for spilling soda on Cruz during a Senate Judiciary hearing the following year, Cruz responded with a Zodiac Killer cryptogram.
He’s gotten in on this again more than once. First, the following Halloween, which made for some quick mockery, and then again in 2020.
And so, kind of like when social media platforms die because everyone’s mom gets on them, knowing that the butt of their jokes was in on the joke made it not fun anymore.
In the same way that rather than ever being caught, the real Zodiac Killer simply faded into ever deeper levels of obscurity, the memes about Ted Cruz being the killer himself will probably never go away.
At least, not as long as people keep loathing Ted Cruz.
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