#420: The Abolition of Reality With John Waters

The Patrick Coffin Show | Interviews with influencers | Commentary about culture | Tools for transformation

Patrick Coffin

Catholicanswers, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Culture, Society & Culture, Commentary, Americanculture, Catholic, Conservative, Podcast, Christian

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2025

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Host Patrick Coffin welcomes Irish journalist and author John Waters, whose eleventh book chronicles the "heinous crime" of the past five years through Substack dispatches. Waters, a former Irish Times columnist and First Things contributor, frames the work as Winston Smith's diary from 1984—a record for the unborn, preserving truths amid erasure.

Waters argues we've entered a copy of reality detached from the original, where politics, ethics, and truth dissolve. COVID lockdowns exemplify this: a health "crisis" masking authoritarian overreach, with media flipping from truth-telling to industrialized lying.

Was COVID a dream, or did it really happen?Once the "land of saints and scholars," Ireland now embodies cultural collapse—abortion's moral ecosystem shattered, fatherhood in apocalypse (echoing Waters' 1994 play Long Black Coat), and institutional betrayal.

He laments: "I am an authority on the destruction of my country," wishing instead for skills in boats or squash.Waters dissects systemic wickedness: tyrannical police, corrupted judiciaries, silent abolition of laws. Beyond news events, Waters probes meanings—lost freedoms, fractured subjects "subdivisible to infinity," and humanity's thieving under technocratic masks. Despite censorship (his book has been shunned by Irish shops), Waters sees Substack as resistance. Advice: Hold fast to the good; pass truth to posterity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Patrick Coffin Show. My name is Patrick Coffin. We're going to have a fantastic
0:04.8	conversation. You'll want to buckle up and sit tight. John Waters is my guest. He's an Irish
0:10.8	writer and playwright and chronicler of history. But I do want to mention one thing, and that is
0:17.0	MyPillow.com. I'm proud to to represent in an affiliate way mypello.com
0:23.3	American-made products. It's not just pillows, which are fantastic. It's doggie beds,
0:27.9	it's sheets, it's slippers, it's bathrobes, all there. And my name, Patrick at the coupon,
0:35.3	checkout area gets you the 66.something percent ridiculously
0:40.0	advantageous Patrick Coffin Show listener discount. So go to MyPillow.com. Patrick's the sub
0:45.2	the subtitle. Patrick is the coupon code at the checkout. And believe me, people have circle back
0:53.5	and thank me. No one has ever said,
0:54.8	you know, I bought the products and they suck. Never. So mypilo.com, Patrick's the code. You're
0:59.9	welcome in advance. It seems when we look in the rear view of our own lives and what we've
1:04.9	undergone since about, oh, March 2020 with the international pandemic that the truth of which is starting to spill out.
1:15.7	It seems all like a dystopian dream.
1:18.6	Well, John Waters, my guest, this episode has taken the time at the time to write down
1:24.0	his ruminations and reflections and put a lot of dots together about this global,
1:30.0	what's the best way to put it.
1:32.5	Coordinated attempt, rather successful at crowd control and propaganda and brainwashing
1:38.8	using the very best techniques.
1:40.9	And we're going to talk about whether or not there's a 2.0 planned, what lessons can we learn?
1:47.2	We'll talk about Mimesis and the power of mass media to keep saying the same thing from so many different angles.
1:53.3	John has put together his substack reflections and analysis in a new book, which is called The Abolition of Reality.
	...

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