Sen. Ted Cruz took some time out of his busy week before midterm elections to reuse a joke he made last year about being the Zodiac Killer.
The Texas Republican tweeted on Wednesday, “Happy Halloween” accompanied by an image of one of the many letters sent to police by the self-proclaimed “Zodiac,” a serial killer who was known to be active from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.
If you’re wondering why the hell Cruz is tweeting something in relation to an unidentified person who terrorized the Bay Area decades ago, then you probably don’t spend that much time on the internet.
So, congratulations to you and here’s a primer: Cruz is referencing a longstanding joke among people online that he is the Zodiac Killer. The meme stems from the basis that people “think he’s creepy,” according to an NPR explainer.
Cruz has also been tied to at least one other conspiracy theory that suggests that his father helped Lee Harvey Oswald pass out flyers supporting Fidel Castro about three months prior to Oswald’s assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
It’s one thing to make fun of yourself here and there, but Cruz seems to think his Zodiac Killer tweet is extremely funny, because this isn’t the first time he’s done it.
In October 2017, Cruz responded to a string of tweets following Sen. Ben Sasse’s admission during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he had just spilled Dr. Pepper on Cruz.
A Twitter user told Sasse that if he were “sitting with the son of the guy who killed Kennedy I might do worse than spill some Dr. Pepper.” Sasse responded by saying he was wearing a “Lee Harvey Oswald Was Framed” T-shirt when the soda spilled, which led to Cruz simply tweeting:
Cruz’s wife, Heidi, chimed in on Cruz’s latest Zodiac joke, telling a writer at The Atlantic that she and Ted “have to try and shield the Zodiac Killer stuff from their oldest daughter, because she might get skeptical and start, like, seriously grilling her dad about where he was on different nights in the early 70s.”
Heidi’s likely joking, or at least... we hope she is.
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