ZadekpediaAl Sharpton is mentioned in The Bob Zadek Show only in passing, as a name invoked by speakers rather than as a guest or the subject of an episode. He appears twice across the available material: once in a 2012 episode on the Trayvon Martin case, and once in the opening of a 2022 episode on e-cigarette regulation.
The Trayvon Martin case (2012)
In an episode devoted to the Trayvon Martin case, Bob Zadek introduced his guest Larry Klayman, describing him as the founder of Judicial Watch and of Freedom Watch, and said Klayman uses the courts to keep an eye on elected officials Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012). Zadek described the case as one in which 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 said allows a person to stand their ground and kill in self-defense if the jury accepts that defense, without a duty to retreat.
Klayman said the case embodied the worst of the legal system, the media and the body politic. He named Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton together, calling them racists and black supremacist racists who make money off such controversies, and said they seize on such cases because they have not had an issue lately. He compared their fundraising to that of Louis Farrakhan at the Nation of Islam. Klayman also said Obama embraced Trayvon Martin; Zadek corrected the phrasing, saying the president had said that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.
Klayman’s account of the case centered on the indictment of Zimmerman. He said there was no legal reason to indict Zimmerman when the indictment came, that a special prosecutor in Florida took the charging decision away from a grand jury, 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. Klayman said the prosecutor indicted Zimmerman on second-degree murder, which he called probably too much if there was any reason to indict at all. He also said that in the same timeframe the New Black Panther Party issued a wanted poster, dead or alive, for Zimmerman, and that Zimmerman’s new lawyer, Mark O’Mara, publicly questioned the “Stand Your Ground” law while saying he would defend Zimmerman on that basis.
Zadek raised the question of the jury pool, saying Obama poisoned the entire jury pool with his statement and asking how Zimmerman could expect anything resembling a fair trial when the president had done so. Klayman agreed, saying Obama not only poisoned the jury pool but threatened the prosecutor that she could be indicted herself if she did not indict Zimmerman. Klayman compared the case to Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which he said he read at Duke University, describing a man convicted in Algeria by a French jury because he did not cry at his mother’s funeral.
Sharpton’s role in this episode is confined to Klayman’s single reference grouping him with Jackson. No excerpt shows Sharpton speaking, organizing, or being questioned about the case.
The Norquist riddle (2022)
The 2022 episode on the FDA and e-cigarettes opens with Bob Zadek posing a question to the audience: what do Grover Norquist and Al Sharpton have in common, and on what subjects might they vote the same FDA’s New Rules Against Smoking (2022). Zadek includes himself in the dare. He says the answer will be found along with the answer to another question — what is the monumental government policy that is always wrong and always tried, the policy that took a constitutional amendment to make the first mistake and a constitutional amendment to correct that mistake.
Zadek then turns to the episode’s subject, e-cigarettes, which he describes as an electronic device, not a cigarette, designed to give people a few moments of innocent pleasure, and he says the government is in the business of depriving people of such pleasure or taxing it away. He introduces his guest Guy Bentley of the Reason Foundation, who handles consumer freedom research there. Bentley says the e-cigarette issue is heating up at the federal level at Congress and the FDA and at the state level, and that legislation in Congress would massively increase taxes on e-cigarettes.
Bentley describes an e-cigarette as a device that heats and aerosolizes a liquid solution, mostly of nicotine, propylene glycol and some flavorings, with no tobacco leaf and no combustion. He says nicotine is not what causes cancer among smokers, and that e-cigarettes are unlikely to pose 5% of the risks of cigarettes. He traces the modern e-cigarette to a Chinese chemist, Hon Lik, a heavy smoker whose father had died of smoking-related diseases, who tried patches, gums and nicotine replacement therapies before building his own device. Bentley says the anti-smoking movement in the United States opposed e-cigarettes, and describes its approach as a quit-or-die mentality — quit nicotine entirely or continue smoking until you die. He notes the public health movement has split on the question, and that some in it now favor harm reduction.
The Norquist–Sharpton riddle is posed and never answered within the episodes. Sharpton functions here as a name in a rhetorical setup, not as a figure whose positions are described.
Across episodes
The two episodes that mention Al Sharpton — the 2012 episode on the Trayvon Martin case and the 2022 episode on e-cigarette regulation — show no development in the treatment of the topic. In 2012 Larry Klayman names Sharpton in a denunciation of figures he says profit from racial controversy; in 2022 Bob Zadek names Sharpton only in an unanswered opening riddle.