There have always been people with bizarre ideas at the fringes of politics, but Ginni Thomas is hardly relegated to the fringes. Although not a dominant figure on the American right, she has for decades now been well known—and, as these texts show, she was a highly influential figure during the Trump era, with a direct line to the White House chief of staff, one of the most important individuals in American government.

What these texts reveal isn’t the White House chief of staff telling Thomas, politely or not, that she’s spreading crazed conspiracy theories and needs to accept that Trump lost the election fair and square; his responses suggest that he either buys into those conspiracy theories or is willing to play along. Meadows and Thomas are aligned, allies in the same cause, speaking the same language. The fact that the chief of staff and the president were on the same page as an activist with rabid political views was a distinct and distinctly terrifying feature of the Trump years.

And it’s not simply that Meadows and Thomas share an affinity for freakish conspiracy theories; it is that they believe we’re engaged in a war without rules—that anything goes because Trump’s victory was stolen and he was all that stood between America and its destruction. One senses from both Thomas and Meadows not just fear of the left, but hatred for it. As for Meadows, he frames it as “a fight of good versus evil.” And then he invokes Jesus (“the King of Kings”) not just to ratify his political ideology, which is bad enough, but to advance a lie in order to overturn an election.