Liberal Comedian Goes Viral for Illustrating Impossibility of Talking to Liberals

I mean, he's not wrong.

This article originally appeared on the Daily Caller News Foundation and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Natalie Sandoval

Why is it so hard to talk to leftists?

Because, as some internet commentators have observed, they constantly pretend not to understand things.

Comedian David Sedaris illustrates the phenomenon nicely in an essay for The New Yorker. Sedaris, who once joked about going back in time and smothering an infant Donald Trump, is hardly a conservative. But Sedaris built a career on noting the idiosyncrasies of his class, so his observations here aren’t without precedent.

Sedaris’ troubles began, as so many do, by taking a walk in Portland, Oregon.

“I lost count of the strung-out addicts I passed on my way to the doughnut shop and back, and I had just headed out from my hotel again when I came upon three men and a woman, all in their late thirties. The four were gathered around a baby carriage, and as I neared the woman lowered her head into it and took a powerful hit off a pipe. Just as I registered that the carriage was empty, two small dogs, both unleashed, rushed toward me, snarling, and one of them bit me on my left leg, just below the knee.”

Sedaris claims the woman denied that her dog attacked him, before the group “collectively shrugged and turned back to the business of smoking fentanyl.”

Fine, but drug addicts aren’t notoriously empathetic. Surely, Sedaris’ plight was met with a little more sympathy from normal people.

“You have to understand that these addicts, especially those with an opioid-use disorder, lead incredibly difficult lives,” a woman reportedly told Sedaris at a book signing, at which he’d discussed his injury.

“How is that an excuse?” Sedaris recalls asking the woman. “Her dog bit me.”

“Well, you’re still better off than she and her friends are.”

Well, true. So what? Are drug addicts immune to criticism because they really like getting high?

If you’re a leftist, the answer is mostly “yes.” Intersectional exceptions apply. Maybe the addict is a white man who yelled a nasty, objectifying remark at a female passerby. Maybe he’s said a racial slur before — A Portland jury recently “acquitted a man who admitted to stabbing a stranger after video captured the victim using a racial slur in the aftermath of the attack,” the Daily Caller reported.

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Sedaris fails to elicit sympathy from anyone else at his book signing.

“People like that aren’t in any condition to take care of their animals,” another woman tells him. “That’s the really sad part.”

“‘Is it?’ [He] asked, pointing to the bandage on [his] leg. ‘Is that the really sad part?’”

Sedaris wonders: “[H]ow hard should it be to get a little sympathy when an unleashed dog bites you? What if I were a baby? I wondered. Would people side with me then? What if I were ninety or blind or Nelson Mandela? Why is everyone so afraid of saying that drug addicts shouldn’t let their dogs bite people?”

Then, he answers his own question.

“We’re afraid we’ll be mistaken for Republicans, when, really, isn’t this something we should all be able to agree on? How did allowing dogs to bite people become a Democratic point of principle? Or is it just certain people’s dogs? If a German shepherd jumped, growling, out of one of those Tesla trucks that look like an origami project and its owner, wearing a MAGA hat, yelled, ‘Trumper, no!!!,’ then would the people in my audience be aghast?”

Sedaris’ story attracted attention on X, with one screenshot racking up nearly half a million views.

“I think he perfectly captures the cultural apathy and moral indifference in the city,” wrote PDX Real, a “community journalism” outlet based in Portland.

Having any sort of standard of behavior for the “marginalized” is indeed Republican-coded. It’s all fun and games until your own policies bite you in the leg.

Copyright 2025 Daily Caller News Foundation

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