After falling for the “Hurricane Shark” hoax throughout Tropical Storm Hilary, Ted Cruz wished to let everybody know he was in on the joke this time.
The Texas senator, and prolific content material creator, shared a doctored picture on Tuesday purporting to point out a shark on a flooded freeway close to the Burning Man competition on the social media platform X, previously generally known as Twitter.
“Holy crap,” Mr Cruz wrote, together with a crossed fingers emoji, to point he was in on the ruse.
The shark meme, which started circulating in 2011, has grow to be an notorious on-line prank well-known to most savvy social media customers, however apparently not Mr Cruz.
Final month, after it was posted to X (previously generally known as Twitter) throughout a tropical storm that unleashed widespread flooding in California, Mr Cruz reposted the image and wrote: “Holy crap.”
After being mocked for falling for the rip-off, the senator added: “I’m advised it is a joke. In LA, you by no means know… And everybody please keep protected from the storm or in any other case.”
Amid the flooding, mud and mayhem unfolding within the northern Nevada desert at Burning Man this yr, hoaxes and conspiracy theories have run rampant on social media.
Wild claims of an Ebola outbreak, a navy quarantine and cannabilism had been reposted and considered thousands and thousands of occasions on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
“Hurricane Shark” first went viral in 2011 when Hurricane Irene devastated Puerto Rico.
Within the 12 years since, the picture of a big shark swimming alongside a flooded freeway has been repeatedly dragged out throughout pure disasters, and conclusively debunked.
Mr Cruz has been making a behavior of falling for web hoaxes of late.
On 27 August, he shared a picture from the “Finish Wokeness” X account which claimed to point out the Biden administration had “welded open the Trump border wall” in Arizona.
“This…is…nuts #BidenBorderCrisis,” he wrote.
Neighborhood notes, the crowd-funded fact-checking service, identified that the floodgates are required to be opened throughout monsoon season.
Mr Cruz didn’t challenge a retraction or correction, and the submit stays up.
“{That a} US senator is gullible sufficient to fall for right-wing disinformation over and over? Sure, that’s nuts,” historian Kevin Kruse commented.
Undeterred, days later Mr Cruz amplified a false declare doing the rounds on right-wing media that the Biden administration was in search of to restrict People to 2 beers per day.
In a performative interview with Newsmax, Mr Cruz took a swig of a beer whereas saying: “If they need us to drink two beers per week, frankly they’ll kiss my a**.
“What’s it with liberals and wanting to regulate each rattling side of your life?”
Mr Cruz was reacting to a assertion by Dr George Koob, the director of the Nationwide Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, who stated that the US’s alcohol consumption tips might change in 2025.