Al Sharpton is not a guest in any of the excerpts below, and no excerpt offers biographical information about him. He enters The Bob Zadek Show twice, in two different decades, and in two entirely different roles: in 2012 as a named target of a guest’s attack on the political response to the Trayvon Martin case, and in 2022 as one term in a rhetorical pairing posed by the host at the top of an episode about e-cigarettes. What the sources support is therefore narrow — a record of how Sharpton is invoked, by whom, and for what argumentative purpose — and the article is limited accordingly.
The Trayvon Martin case (2012)
The earlier appearance comes in an episode with Larry Klayman, identified by Bob Zadek as the founder of Judicial Watch and of Freedom Watch. Zadek introduces the case: George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager wearing a hoodie, allegedly under the Florida version of the “Stand Your Ground” law, which Zadek describes as allowing one to stand their ground and kill in self-defense if the jury accepts that defense, without a duty to retreat Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012).
Klayman’s column on the matter, which Zadek calls “The Legal Cesspool of the Martin Case,” supplies the framing. Klayman tells Zadek the case embodies the very worst of the legal system, the media and the whole body politic, all wrapped up into one example. He states that there is nothing wrong with the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law in his view, and that a jury will determine whether the self-defense claim was valid.
It is at this point that Sharpton appears. Klayman says that immediately you have these racists, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton — he calls them black supremacist racists who make money off of this, who gin up this kind of a backlash to be able to raise money, much like Louis Farrakhan does at the Nation of Islam — and that they seize on the case because they have not had an issue lately. He then turns to Barack Obama, saying the president seizes on it and embraces Trayvon Martin. Zadek corrects the formulation: Obama said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. Klayman agrees.
Klayman’s argument then moves to the legal machinery. He says there was no reason legally to indict Zimmerman when they did; that a special prosecutor in Florida took the charging decision away from a grand jury of peers of both Martin and Zimmerman and made the decision herself; and that she did so only after Obama’s Justice Department, through Attorney General Eric Holder, put pressure on Florida officials by opening a civil rights investigation that could lead to their criminal prosecution if they did not indict. He says she indicted Zimmerman on second-degree murder, which was probably too much if there was any reason to indict at all. He also describes a press conference held by Zimmerman’s former lawyers a few days before the indictment, at which they said they could not find Zimmerman after only two days and revealed attorney-client confidences; Klayman’s own characterization is that they were probably fired and were doing a CYA, one of their last hurrahs for advertising purposes. He notes that during the same timeframe the New Black Panther Party issued a wanted poster, dead or alive, for George Zimmerman, and speculates that the prosecutor may even have felt her life would have been threatened if she did not indict. He criticizes Zimmerman’s new lawyer, Mark O’Mara, for playing to the crowd by conceding that perhaps the “Stand Your Ground” law is not the best law there ever was and perhaps Florida needs to talk about changing it, while still defending Zimmerman on that basis — asking what kind of lawyer undercuts the one law that may save his client from a life sentence or execution.
Zadek’s own contribution to the segment is a question about jury taint: he says the issue that jumped off the page at him was how quickly Obama poisoned the entire jury pool with his statement, and asks how Zimmerman can expect anything resembling a fair trial when the president has done so at a press conference. Klayman agrees and adds that Obama not only poisoned the jury pool but threatened the prosecutor that if she did not indict Zimmerman, she could get indicted herself. Klayman closes the passage with a literary reference — The Stranger by Albert Camus, which he says he read at Duke University, in which an Arab was convicted in Algeria by a French jury because he did not cry at his mother’s funeral — and asks whether the country has arrived at the absurdist view of Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sharpton’s function in this segment is entirely as a named example. Klayman does not describe any action Sharpton took in the Martin case, any statement he made, or any organization he leads; the claim is that he and Jackson profit from such controversies and had been looking for an issue. Zadek does not adopt the characterization in his own voice; his follow-up questions concern