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If you have vivid memories of President Donald Trump’s bungling of the COVID pandemic response, you may find yourself a little bewildered that in the lead-up to the midterms, the Republican Party is trying to remind us as much as possible about that era. Many Americans remember watching the then president lie about the severity of the disease and tout quack cures (never forget the suggestion to maybe inject bleach into your veins). Spending time relitigating that era may seem, to the non-MAGA public, like the opposite of common sense for Republican messaging.

And yet, it’s becoming abundantly clear that this is the GOP’s plan. For months, Republicans, led by Sen. Rand Paul, have pushed investigations and hearings into theoretical wrongdoing by Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institutes of Health. This culminated in a hearing on Wednesday in which Paul and other Republican senators berated a silent Fauci and accused him of cover-ups and evil schemes. Fauci’s decision to take the Fifth did not prevent influencers from turning the clips that did surface into rage bait, packaged with campaign messaging. As the conspiracy-theorist influencer Jack Posobiec wrote on X on Wednesday, “The Fauci hearing is a reminder of who comes back into power if the Democrats get back in office.”

This strategy appears to be an effort to revive the anger of a population that saw the pandemic as its political origin story. Right-leaning Americans who had never been particularly civically engaged found themselves at city hall meetings or out in protests, furious about business closures and stay-at-home orders. The conservative impulse to champion individual liberty—at least individual liberty as it applied to them—butted headfirst against the collectivist nature of a public health response. We all remember this; what some may have not noticed is how that anger, in certain segments of the population, never went away.

Plenty of internet pundits, however, have kept their eye on this and continued to deliberately stoke the anger themselves. For the past five years, conservative influencers and right-wing news media have periodically reminded their users, in heated language, of the injustices of that time. But more than that, they’ve pushed conspiracy theories that have spun policy disagreements and........

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