Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer

The Internet likes to make jokes. For all of the countless millions of dollars invested by the government, businesses and individuals the world over, one of the main things for which a decent percentage of people use the World Wide Web is to make fun of other people. We’ve untapped the power of an interconnected world, and this is what we’ve attained.

People in positions of prominence and authority are more likely to become the target of such jokes, and so it is that Ted Cruz, junior senator from Texas and junior candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency, has become the target of a particularly esoteric one. But it is just a joke, and so we will dispatch with it curtly:

No, Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac killer.

The messages were coded with symbols, forming what’s called a “cipher.” A cipher is something like this:

dtz itsy sjji yt yjqq rj ymfy ymnx fwynhqj bfx f izrg bfxyj tk ynrj fx n fr fbfwj

These notes, coded and uncoded, went on for years. The killer was never identified.

The claim

So how did this come back to Cruz? Because jokes. I already explained that.

The Daily Dot, which is to Internet jokes what The Washington Post is to Capitol Hill, traced the origin of the Ted-Cruz-is-the-Zodiac-Killer meme back to 2013. Specifically, here:

As Cruz has gained national attention, so, too, has the joke. There’s a hashtag, naturally, filled with insights such as:

Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning polling firm that has made a name for itself by tacking amusing questions onto the end of its surveys, apparently was persuaded to include a question about Cruz being the Zodiac Killer in a new poll in Florida.

Some small consolation for the senator, I suppose.

Update: The full poll is out. “38% of Florida voters think it’s possible that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer,” PPP’s Tom Jensen writes. “10% say he for sure is, and another 28% say that they are just not sure. Cruz is exonerated from being a toddler serial killer by 62% of the Sunshine State populace.”

Because the other prominent feature of the Internet, after the joke-making, is that a lot of people will not get the joke and will take it seriously — helping to make “Snopes” a household name — we figured we may as well dispatch with this rumor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/25/the-definitive-debunking-ted-cruz-is-not-the-zodiac-killer/