Andrew Clavin mocks youth-led gun protests as emotionally driven, citing higher violent crime in gun-controlled regions like England while dismissing media sympathy for child activists. Charlotte Pence defends her father against attacks, contrasting Hollywood’s liberal bias with her conservative upbringing and children’s book Marlon Bundo, published by Regnery. Clavin ties film reviews—Red Sparrow’s moral ambiguity and The Foreigner’s political intrigue—to a broader critique of modern discourse replacing reason with power dynamics, warning that without virtue or truth, society risks manipulation over freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
So around a million children played hookie from school yesterday and took to the streets and to television to demand that Americans give up the right to bear arms, which the founders guaranteed in the Constitution.
Since our news media was too busy fawning over these courageous, adorable, ignorant little blots, they never got around to asking them the questions I'd like to hear these tots and totets answer.
Here are some questions I'd like to ask the protesting children.
Do you know what the Constitution is?
Do you understand why the founding fathers thought to protect the right to bear arms from the government?
Do you know who the founding fathers were?
Do you know what government is?
Can you name the three branches of government?
Do you know the square root of 256?
How does a bill become law?
Who is James Madison?
Have you done your homework?
Why aren't you in school?
Have you finished your chores?
Do you even have chores?
Have you ever read a book without pictures in it?
Remind me again why you aren't in school.
How would it be if the next time you tried to take one of my constitutional rights away, I took away your allowance and sent you to your room without supper?
Go shovel the snow out of the driveway.
Okay, that last one wasn't a question.
In fact, it was an order.
So why are you still standing there?
Go shovel the snow, little brat.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Roll the zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we have Charlotte Pence with us today, the vice president's daughter.
She's written a children's book called A Day in the Life of the Vice President.
And I got to talk to her a little bit about what it was like to be the daughter of a guy who gets, I said to her, he is the most attacked for the least.
He doesn't do anything wrong, and he's getting attacked all the time.
We also have Aristotle is with us.
Aristotle is getting to be kind of a Daily Wire contributor.
He's like, you know, we bring him on all the time.
We also have Jesus, who you remember from our last sermon.
So we have a lot of guests on today.
But first, we have to talk about what should we talk about?
You know, we'll talk about sleep.
I got home so late last night and I usually, I really don't mind it, you know, but I wake up about 5 in the morning, 5.15 in the morning, and I did not get to bed till about 1.
So even for me, that's maybe I lost like an hour of sleep.
But the thing is, I hit the bed and I just, usually I stay awake because I don't sleep a lot, but I hit the bed and I just went out like a light.
And I have to say, those bowl and branch sheets are so comfortable.
They are so incredibly comfortable.
And they don't cost that much, you know.
I mean, they just, I guess it's because they sell them online, that they don't have to charge you all the extra stuff.
And it's just Boland Branch is just, I don't know.
What makes them unique is that each sheet is crafted from 100% organic cotton.
And that means Bolin Branch sheets not only feel incredible, but they also look really good.
Now, I have to be honest, my wife cares what the sheets look like me.
I'm just like, gone.
And even when I'm awake, when I'm reading, I want my sheets to be comfortable.
And since Bolin Branch sells exclusively online, you don't pay that expensive retail market at half the price for twice the quality.
Go to Bolinbranch.com today and you'll get 50 bucks off your first set of sheets, plus free shipping in the U.S. when you use the promo code Clavin.
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
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And when you wash them, they get even more comfortable for some reason.
I don't know.
It's magic, probably.
I have no idea why that happens.
So we've been talking, we talk a lot about this, but I'm going to talk about it again because I just think yesterday it's so important after what I saw yesterday, all these like a million kids all over the country protesting the fact that we have the right to bear arms, like protesting our Constitution.
A million know-nothing little punks protesting the Constitution.
Feminist Narrative Battles00:02:40
And one of the things I talk about is the fact that we have lost, all of us, even on the right, a lot of us, have lost the reasons why we believe what we believe.
And so when you lose the reason for something, everything becomes narrative.
Nothing becomes argument.
Nothing becomes logic.
Nothing becomes actual debate.
It just becomes narrative.
And so children, right, make for good narrative.
And just to show you how we lose the narrative, we lose the narrative.
Remember Hillary Clinton was in Mumbai and she made those stupid remarks about how deplorable you all are.
Interesting remarks because basically she was saying if you weren't rich, you didn't vote for her.
So she was the candidate of the rich.
She was admitting she was the candidate of the rich.
But the other thing she said was this is insulting things about white women.
White women didn't vote for her because their husbands wouldn't let them.
So here's what she said.
We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married white women.
And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever believes you should.
So there's the icon of feminism, right, who got where she is because of her husband.
The only reason she's anybody is because of her husband.
And Kellyanne Conway struck back at her saying this.
Let me tell you something, lady.
The idea that I or other women like me have to ask our husbands how to vote, it's really a joke, particularly since I won't say your name, but I'll appeal to you directly, particularly since this country knows who you are first and foremost because of whom you married.
And so stop pretending you're a feminist.
You're for equality.
You're for fairness to women.
And then running around accusing us of checking with our husbands and our significant others before we vote.
I think that this is very representative of how angry and bitter and ungracious many in her, many have become in this country, frankly.
But you know what?
Keep rolling the tape.
So many Democrats just want her to stop, and I'm sure so many Republicans just want her to continue.
So this is how feminism has won the narrative.
It hasn't won the argument.
It has won the narrative.
The narrative is she now says, I'm a feminist, and then she makes a mistake and says something unfeminist, and the right strikes back at her by saying, oh, you know, you're not feminist.
We're the feminists.
And the right, you always hear the right saying this, you know, that it's not the left who's feminist, we're the feminist.
Nobody says maybe wives should ask their husbands why they vote.
Maybe the husbands know more, maybe the husbands know more about politics.
Maybe the wives know more about something else.
Feminism's Narrative Victory00:06:17
Why is it insulting?
And maybe that is what happened, and maybe it was the right thing that happened.
Maybe these women are so happy, so busy with their home and their kids that they don't have time to pay attention to politics.
So they say to their husbands, honey, who should I vote for?
And the husbands who are paying more attention tell them, would that be a sin?
It would be a sin in the religion of feminism.
It's not a sin in my life.
It's not a sin in my world.
But feminism has won the narrative.
Whether it's right or wrong, it has won the narrative.
So when these kids come out and they start talking and, you know, they're just all of them.
They're the, you know, like all teenagers, all teenagers are Nazis.
And we'll get back to that in a minute.
All teenagers know what they know, but because they know what they know because they don't know what they don't know.
Okay.
Let us just get back, go all the way back.
And this is why we have Aristotle with us today, right?
Aristotle said the purpose of life, says Aristotle, is eudaimonia, which is what Jesus, here's Jesus, because this is why we have these shelves.
Jesus called life in abundance.
He said, I'm here to give you life in abundance.
It's what we on the Andrew Clavin show called joy, right?
Joy is the purpose of life.
The joy is to live life with great energy.
It's not to be happy because sometimes life is sad.
It is to be joyful, involved in life, to be your full self, to be the self that God made.
Yesterday we had on the mailbag, we were talking about shame.
Somebody talked about fat pride, and I said, All pride marches are really shame marches because people feel ashamed of something, whether they should or not.
They feel ashamed of something and they're blaming other people.
They think if they can just get other people to stop saying bad things about them, they'll then be happy.
But that's not true.
You feel joy when you orientate yourself toward the good.
And you know, here are things that both Jesus and Aristotle said.
Like Jesus said, it's what comes out of a man's heart that defiles a man.
It's what's in a man's heart that defiles a man.
He said, a lot of people don't understand this part when he said, you've heard it said, don't commit adultery, but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
And what he's saying is, you are, you're not just what you do, you are why you do it.
And Aristotle pointed this out too.
He said, the good man is not the man who does a certain thing.
It's the man who has trained, he's trained his passions to follow the good.
And we were talking about this, I don't know, a week ago, about a guy who does what one guy doesn't cheat on his wife because he loves his wife and he believes that fidelity is a good, and so he trains himself to be faithful for that reason, to want to be faithful for those good reasons, for those internal reasons.
And another guy is faithful to his wife because his wife's father is a mobster and says, if you ever cheat on my wife, on my daughter, I'll kill you.
You know, those are two different people.
One is a faithful husband and one is just a coward.
And so it's really why you do, how you do, what you, you know, the good things that you do and how you learn to be free and how you learn to be good.
You have to be free to do that.
You have to be able to choose to do the good.
All joy comes from doing the good through passion.
And you have to be free to do that.
You have to be free to do that.
So this stuff came from Aristotle through Jesus.
These two strains of thought, the classic Greek thought and the Jewish thought, came together and informed.
It wasn't like everybody who ever had a thought in Western civilization was thinking about this, but this all informed all of Western civilization.
And they understood over time that people had to be free.
Now, you know, when you lose, when we lost the reason for doing good, when we forgot what it is, then you only have things that feel good.
You know, you say, and I don't mean just like pleasure.
You say, well, this makes me feel righteous.
We talk about virtue signaling, right?
This makes me feel virtuous.
And Nietzsche pointed out that that kind of good is really just a will to power.
That kind of good is really just saying, I like this, I think this is good, and I want you to think it's good too, because I have no argument.
I only have power.
So I want the will to power.
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So this has been true.
This is true before Nietzsche discovered it.
Remember, Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, what is truth?
And people constantly, I mean, this is what Plato and Aristotle were arguing against, was all the philosophers around them were saying, well, good is relative.
You know, just like they say now, good is relative.
There is no absolute good.
And Plato and Socrates and Aristotle were saying, eh, not so much.
And Jesus was saying, no, there is a thing called truth.
I'm it.
I'm the truth.
And if you follow me, I will lead you to that truth.
So when you lose that, all you've got is the will to power and narrative, because narrative gins up the emotions and it places you in a story that makes it seem like whatever the person is selling you is good.
Emotionalism and Absolutism00:12:51
And that's why they bring out these children.
It's also, by the way, why you have guns.
You have guns because people who don't know the good want to have power over you.
They want to impose their good on you, which strips you of joy.
It strips you of the right to choose to do good, right?
It really does all fit together.
This is why people get upset when they hear read Plato's Republic because he wanted to expel the poets because he didn't think they would teach people good.
But you do have to have a civilization that teaches you the good.
That is one of the things we had back in the 1950s when they would teach you why you were free.
When I went to school, they would teach you why people had to be free and what it meant and why it mattered.
And now they don't teach you that anymore.
They just have emotional arguments for why guns are scary.
Take away the guns.
And that's why they bring out these kids, right?
That is why they bring out the kids, because they think the kids are, the kids are an emotional prop.
They're an emotional narrative.
They're an emotional story.
Now, let me show you, just show you for a minute how the networks.
First of all, let me just show you one of the kids.
Just pick a kid that we have in the, it's Matt Post, number one.
It's the top one.
I believe that as students, we need to make a few things clear.
To start, we will not sit in classrooms with armed teachers.
We refuse to learn in fear.
We reject turning our schools into prisons.
We will accept nothing less than comprehensive gun control.
And if it's what it takes, we will shame our national policymakers into protecting us.
Not just in schools, but in churches, movie theaters, on the streets, and the communities of color, which are disproportionately devastated by the sickness of gun violence.
Thank you.
The lawmakers who fail to support us, those who look for every answer to our nation's gun problem, but the guns themselves will be complicit in every death that comes after.
So all of that, all emotionalism.
It's all emotionalism.
You know that there are more, many more, like two or three times more violent crimes in England where there is a lot of gun control, more violent crime in England than there is in the United States.
And people don't like to talk about that.
They also don't like to talk about the fact that, you know, polls are very confusing about what young people think about guns.
Really, a lot of young people are not for gun control.
This is a million kids, which is an extraordinary demonstration, but there's like 56 million kids in the country.
And some of these kids were in kindergarten, so they didn't know what the hell they're talking about.
They just want to get out of school.
You know, there's a Second Amendment Foundation, which saw a 1,200% surge in youth membership.
So that's not being covered.
It's all this kid and emotion, this bullying.
And because this is important with emotionalism, it's important if you're doing a narrative not to let the opposite team get their narrative out.
That's why another reason you have to have censorship, you don't need censorship if you have arguments, right?
We don't need censorship on this show.
We don't need censorship at the Daily Wire.
No right-winger of substance is trying to censor anybody in America today.
Only left-wingers are trying to do it.
Why?
Because they have no argument.
They have no argument.
And if you watch, here's a new Prague High School, New Prague High School, I guess, in Minnesota.
One kid walks out with a sign that says, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
The principal of New Prague High School in Minnesota comes out and chases him away.
His narrative is not allowed.
Look at this.
We don't.
Yeah, we do.
Supreme Court.
505 kids, you can ask.
Why?
489.
He's pointing his finger at him.
And let me just play one more thing, and then we'll do, we'll talk about something else.
But let me just play this.
This is an older video.
This was not yesterday, of Allison Camerada.
This is cut number 11, talking to these kids and listen to her feeding them the narrative, right?
They're telling, first they get the emotionalism from them, which is just pure bilge.
It's just utter bilge.
And then Allison Camerada feeds them the narrative that they're supposed to deliver.
So what do you say to the NRA?
Disband.
Dismantle.
And don't make another organization.
Yeah, don't make another organization under a different name.
Don't you dare come back here.
The fact that you were in power for so long and that you had so much influence for so long in America just goes to show how much time and effort we still need to spend on fixing our country.
Absolutely.
And gun control is just the first thing right now, the first thing that we are mainly focusing on.
Look, I don't have to tell you guys, they give millions of dollars to politicians.
They have a very powerful tool.
So, I mean, how do you expect politicians who need money to keep running for office to say no to the NRA?
Because we keep telling them that if they accept this blood money, they're against the children.
They're against the people who are dying.
And that is, there's no other way to put it at this point.
You're either funding the killers or you are standing with the children.
There's no other way to put it.
There's no other way to put it.
But listen to what Allison Camerada did.
She's talked about the money that the NRA gives to support their point of view, as if nobody else were giving money to politicians to support their point of view.
Money is speech in America.
Money is a way you get your speech heard that the NRA has a point that the NRA is trying to support.
You know, no, they just want to kill, they want to kill the children.
That is why Dana Lash goes to work every day and she says, you know what I want?
I want dead kids.
That's what she's saying.
I mean, it doesn't even make any sense.
You know, this is the other thing.
The entire thing doesn't make any sense because they're talking about essentially when you give up your guns, you are trusting to the government.
It's the government that failed in Florida, right?
They went 39 times to this guy's house, this shooter's house, didn't do a damn thing about it while the shooting was going on.
The cops waited outside.
It's the government that failed.
They hate the government.
Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the government.
He's the guy in the government.
But let's trust him with our rights.
We trust Donald Trump, but we hate Donald Trump.
Take our guns because something, something.
You know, it doesn't even make any sense.
It's gibberish.
It is all emotionalism because they have lost the plot of America.
They've lost the plot of the West.
So all of this requires silence, and that's what we're seeing.
You know, my pal Steve Crowder was banned from Twitter and YouTube.
I think he's still suspended, they call it, for some, you know, Crowder's a comedian, and he says all this outrageous things.
And this is another thing you'll notice, by the way.
The left's comedians are not funny anymore.
You know, Jimmy Kimmel goes on and cries, and Stephen Colbert is just bitter.
And they use Donald Trump the way comedians, second-rate comedians use the F-word.
They use Donald Trump because their audience will always laugh if they say Trump is stupid, if they say Trump is corrupt, if they say he's in league with Russia.
It's the same as using the F-word.
People will laugh when you curse on stage.
And then you watch a guy like Jerry Seinfeld, who never curses because he's funny.
He's just really funny.
Even Louis Seke, who before he was shamed and cast out into the exterior darkness, was really funny.
He used to do two kinds of material, blue material, which was okay, and then his other stuff, his observational stuff, which was hilarious, you know?
And that's the way they use Donald Trump.
They're not funny anymore.
Crowder is still funny, and so he was banned.
Christina Hoff Summers, who's been on the show a couple times, we should have her back soon.
She went to give a speech at Lewis and Clark Law School, I think it was, and they were shouting her down.
She writes about it in the Wall Street Journal today.
They shouted her down.
They played music, and they did try.
The administration tried to let her speak, but she couldn't.
And she was really cut short because the adults have lost their way.
It's all emotionalism.
It's all narrative.
So they have to keep the other narrative silent.
So to show you how the adults have, here is a piece from the New York Times, our favorite people from Knucklehead Row.
Do we have the Knucklehead Row song?
So I saw this article.
It came out two weeks ago or something, and I kept seeing it around.
And the headline was so stupid that I thought it wasn't going to be worth reading except to make fun of.
But when I read it, it actually is not a stupid article all the way through.
It's really a sad article.
It's by a guy named Tim Criter, who's a teacher.
And the headline is, Go ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us.
Okay?
Go ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us.
And he says he's an aging Gen Xer.
But listen to what he says, because it's not what you think it is.
It's not at first what you think it is.
He says, like most people in middle age, I regard young people with suspicion.
The young and the young at mind tend to be uncompromising absolutists.
And that is exactly right.
Why?
Because they don't know anything.
When you don't know anything, you have to make extrapolations, generalizations from a very small piece of information.
You talk to a baby and the baby sees a dog.
Baby thinks the dog might be a person.
How does he know?
Every living thing he's seen talks and interacts with him, but the dog doesn't.
He has to learn things before he stops making gigantic generalizations.
So the guy says the young and the young at mind tend to be uncompromising absolutists.
He goes on, I am creeped out by the increasing dogmatism and intolerance of millennials on the left.
I felt a generational divide open up under me last year when everyone under 40 seemed to agree that Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till in his coffin should be removed from the Whitney.
When I was young, it seemed the natural order of things.
The conservatives were the prudes and scolds who wanted books banned and exhibitions closed, while we liberals got to be the gadflies and iconoclasts.
I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you're in the wrong because you're going to die and they'll get to write history.
But I just can't help noticing that the liberal side isn't much fun to be on anymore.
And that's what I'm talking about.
Crowder is still funny because Crowder can say whatever he wants and think whatever he wants.
He doesn't have to worry about insulting blacks, except on Twitter and YouTube, because that's where they'll ban you for being funny, for being free, for being free.
That's what they ban you for.
They ban you for being free.
Okay, so he talks about the left has become puritanical, censorious, grim, humorless, and they shut down speech.
I guess that's saying it twice, censorious.
They shut down speech.
And young people exemplify this.
So that's where he starts, all right?
And then he says, yet, this uprising of the young against the ossified monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth, its ignorance, naivete, and passionate Manichaean idealism are also its strengths.
Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them.
They don't understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it.
Revolutions have always been driven by the young.
This is also true, and revolutions have always, always ended with bloodshed, despair, and slavery.
Only one revolution has worked, a revolution of Englishmen against Englishmen.
It was actually a civil war, and that's the American Revolution.
That's the only one that has improved the lives of the people who revolted.
So this is his final word.
My message as an aging Gen Xer to millennials and those coming after them is go get us.
Take us down.
All those cringing provincials who still think climate change is a hoax, that being transgender is a fad, or that socialism means purges and re-education camps just because it does.
Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions, gender roles as disfiguring as footbinding, the moribund and vampiric two-party system, the savage theology of capitalism.
Rip it all to the ground.
I, for one, can't wait till we're gone.
I just wish I could live to see the world without us.
In other words, he is giving up on adulthood.
He is giving up on the Western story.
He is giving up on a freedom because he has forgotten what it's for.
He has forgotten eudaimonia.
He has forgotten life in abundance.
He has forgotten joy that only comes through virtue, that only can be found when you are free.
He has forgotten what the West is about.
And so he's saying, tear it down, tear it down.
Marlon's Rabbits00:14:33
What does he think will rise up in its stead?
What does he think will replace it?
They've lost the plot, and so they're calling on the children to destroy them.
It's an amazing thing.
And by the way, I saw this once before.
I lived through the 60s.
I saw the children rise up.
I saw the adults cede their authority.
I saw them say, oh, I saw them bought off by sex.
I saw them say, oh, a world in which we can have sex with anyone we want.
Good, great.
Tear down Western civilization.
I saw them allow young people to take over their places in college.
At least they were college students.
At least they'd learned something in life instead of these tots, you know.
But it was still the same thing.
It was all these kids who did not understand what the West was about.
And so they were happy to tear it down.
Hey-ho, hey-ho, Western civ has got to go.
That's what they used to chant.
And the adults gave ground.
We should tell these kids to go back to school, sit down, do their homework, and shut up.
Here is one child, however.
She's not really a child.
Very bright young lady.
But here's a child who was raised a lot differently than some of these kids are.
Charlotte Pence is, of course, the daughter of Vice President Mike Pence.
And she is establishing a budding career out here in Hollywood in film production and literature.
She's, well, we talk about this in the interview.
She joined me a few days ago to discuss her new children's book, which is called Marlon Bundo's Day in the Life of the Vice President.
And it follows her pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo.
And you ask yourself, why is he named Marlon Bundo?
And that will all be revealed.
And the rabbit takes you through a day in the vice president.
It is actually kind of a nice little teaching tool for children.
All of those children who are out, instead of being in school yesterday, could have read this book.
It's all for a worthy cause, too.
She's donating part of the proceeds to A21's fight to end human trafficking in the 21st century, an actual good cause.
Here is Charlotte Pence discussing her new book.
Charlotte, thank you for being here.
It's nice to see you.
It was nice to meet you.
I've never met you before.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
This is awesome.
You are the author.
You are now an author, I may say, of the book, A Day in the Life of the Vice President with Marlon Bundo, the rabbit.
Now, on the back, the rabbit is real.
Yes, he's a real rabbit.
He's an actual rabbit.
He's my rabbit.
You have this, you keep this rabbit?
Yes.
The rabbit's a good pet.
He is.
Yeah, I got him in college.
He lives, I mean, he lives at the Naval Observatory now because, you know, he has official duties as the Bodis.
But, you know, he did.
He lived with me in college.
The bunny in the room.
He lived with me in college.
I got him for a film project and he lived with me for a couple of years and it was great.
Wow.
Yeah.
Don't turn your back on him.
They'll just tear you to pieces.
All right.
So you're writing a children's book about a day in the life of the vice president, which you know about because you are the daughter of the vice president.
Yes.
Which I have to say, I'm a big fan of your father's.
I am.
I call him, I've conflated his name into Minch because I think he is one of the most solid people in the administration.
I have never seen, seriously, a man attacked more for less.
When that's your dad, what is that like?
What's it like to have a guy who's under fire like that?
I mean, well, I think about it in this way.
I think that, I mean, when you're a public servant, it does come with the territory.
It never feels good to see someone you love be attacked, especially for things that you know aren't true about them, especially.
But I think, you know, my dad has this saying that he always says, and I've taken it to heart.
He always says when we see protesters at events or protesters outside our house, sometimes he'll say, you know, Charlotte, that's what freedom looks like.
And so it is.
And I think that that's part of taking criticism.
And as a daughter, I might not like seeing somebody that I love be talked about in that way.
But as an American, it makes me really proud because it means that we live in a country and a society where people can speak out against their elected leaders and they're allowed to do so.
Wow, that's a dwindling perspective, but it is the right one.
It's the only way you can be free if you're allowed for that.
Exactly.
Here's the thing that I always wonder about this because he is portrayed in such a hostile way.
Obviously, the one that was the big one was on the view recently where they said he was mentally ill because he talked to Jesus like everybody else in America.
When you're sitting there talking to the guy, he's your father.
You know him pretty well.
Is he completely different than the pictures that you see, than the depiction you get of him in the press?
Oh, I see.
Just as a human being.
I think it's hard for me to know.
I mean, because I don't think I take anything in the press seriously that would portray him in such a negative light.
I know he's, you know, the, I mean, I don't know, most open-minded, kindest person.
I mean, the best idea of a father, of a man, an example of a good person in my mind to me.
So I feel like anything that depicts him otherwise, I almost don't even really pay attention to just because I know he's, I mean, he's the best example of a father like I can even think of that you could even make up.
I mean, he's just full of compassion and teachable moments all the time.
And I mean, I love him.
I look up to him.
I respect him.
We disagree on things sometimes too.
And we have open debates all the time in our house and on the phone.
And he's always been the most patient person to come to with questions and he'll explain his side of the view.
But then he'll also come back and say, you know, what do you think about it?
And he's, yeah, that's eager to share opinions.
It's very nice to hear.
This is why I never let my children get interviewed because they wouldn't say any of these things.
I'm sure they used to.
Obviously, you're raised in a religious family and now you're working in Hollywood, which is the exact opposite.
How do you like the human sacrifices?
You work.
Are you at UTA?
Is that what you're doing?
You're at United Talents.
Okay.
Yes.
So you're actually working.
So you're working for a Hollywood agent, right?
Which is the opposite of religion.
How do you find working in Hollywood?
I honestly, it's been really great.
Honestly, UTA especially has really been very welcoming to me.
That's great.
And it's good.
I mean, I think I tell conservatives all the time, you know, come on in.
The water's fine.
I think that there's probably a perception Hollywood gives off a little bit of being pretty liberal.
I like the a little bit.
Yeah, okay.
But I, I mean, honestly, I've met a lot of liberals.
I've met a lot of conservatives.
I've made a lot of friends.
And I think at the end of the day, when people meet you, you're just a person, you know, and you are a person they like or they don't like.
And I think that in a way, I've really been blessed to be able to come out here and be able to work in the industry I always wanted to work in and be accepted.
I think that, yeah, I think Hollywood is a place that has lots of different viewpoints.
And I think that those viewpoints are starting to be talked about more.
I think one of the things is I think if you're at a talent agency where people have business minds, you do meet more conservatives.
I mean, I can talk to agents a lot of times more than I can talk to the talent because the talent is so far on one side that it can be really difficult to deal with them.
I mean, if you're looking for work as talent in Hollywood, it can be really tough.
You have openly conservative views.
You were also working for Epiphany?
Yes, yeah.
I worked for a company out near in Boston, actually, like right outside of Boston.
It was a film production company.
Yeah.
So I've had a couple different experiences there.
Yeah, no, Mike Flyers is a good guy.
So you write a book.
First of all, you read a children's book.
What is the plan?
Is the plan to go into the movies or is the plan to be a writer or both?
Uh-oh.
Oh, sorry.
Your father called and he was asking, what is she doing?
No.
I mean, I've always been a writer since I was a little kid, storyteller.
I was up at night telling my sister stories to help her sleep and, you know, just late into the night on car rides.
I think I've always wanted to tell stories.
And so in school, in college, I transitioned that into telling stories through filmmaking.
I think that that'll always be part of something that I want to do and also on the documentary side.
But I've always been also a narrative writer too.
And it's kind of where my passion lies.
Really?
That's so happy to hear that because that's what I love.
This is written in poetry.
It is.
Day in the life of the vice president is written in poetry, which I was impressed by.
But that's not where you're going.
You see yourself as a storyteller of one kind or another.
A storyteller in general, yeah, for sure.
And I think I've also been interested so much in the middle grade and young adult and children literature side.
So to write a children's book as my first book was just really special.
And do you want to continue doing that?
Do you want to continue addressing kids?
Yeah, I think so.
I think I could also see myself doing nonfiction writing and like narrative style for adults as well.
Okay.
And now, a day in the life of the vice president, did they ask you to do this or did you just decide your idea, really?
Oh, yeah.
So we had an Instagram account for Marlon.
And right after the inauguration, the day after, we were like, we have to get this handle of Marlon Bundo.
So someone took it on Twitter.
So you're like, we have to get the Instagram.
And we did it.
And he just got pretty popular on Instagram.
And my mom and I had talked about we should write a book for him.
And we were literally sitting on the couch one day in our house in the Naval Observatory and started brainstorming ideas.
And I, you know, I kind of said, well, what if he was on the campaign trail or what if he did this?
And my mom, I remember, pulled out her phone and started taking notes.
We thought the first one really had to be about the vice presidency to kind of introduce him to the world, especially.
This is only the first Marlon Bundo.
Oh, okay.
And so, yeah, so I think my mom also being an illustrator and she illustrated the book was able to tell me, you know, I know I can paint this scene.
So let's do a scene, a stanza of that.
And so we really worked on it together.
She's really good.
I mean, she's really good.
I should have mentioned it.
Your mother illustrated the book.
And it's amazing.
She's really nice.
I mean, really different.
Has she always done that?
Yeah, yeah.
She's been a watercolor artist my whole life.
She had a business for it for a while and she was an art teacher.
She's just very, very talented.
Now, I notice, I don't want to get too political on you, but I noticed the book is published by Regnery, which is a famous conservative publisher.
And I think they do great work.
They're amazing.
The world of children's publishing is another world that has been very insular for a very long time.
Do you think that that's going to be a problem for you in the future?
Do you think that it's going to be tough for you to speak to children through that, get through that wall?
I would hope not.
I would hope not because I think that, I mean, especially with this book too, I think it can be a place where we come together.
And I think that I think it should be.
I mean, I think that you don't have to have something that's overtly political in a book or overtly not political in a book for children to pick up on it and to learn something from it.
So I think I would hope that it wouldn't be, but I think that we're moving in a direction where it won't be.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not a political book.
It's really just about the book.
It's not a book.
It's just about the job of it.
And so what else is Marlon Bundo going to do?
I don't know.
I mean, we're excited.
We're seeing, you know, I don't know about other adventures he might be going on in the future, but for the main part right now, he's out there.
I cannot believe it.
Is this rabbit allowed in the White House?
He's been in the White House.
The rabbit who's been in the White House.
Yes.
Yes.
He went to a military family event.
Did he really?
Yeah, my mom brought him and kids just, they just loved him.
They absolutely love him.
He's really nice too.
Not all rabbits are really nice, but I can brag on him and talk about how he's very friendly and very calm.
And why is he?
Is he named after Marlon Brando?
He is, yes.
How do you get from Marlon Brando to Marlon Bundo?
So actually, it's a funny story.
When I got him for a student film project, my friends and I were looking for a rabbit and it was a script that I had written.
And there was a rabbit in it.
People said, you know, change it, take the rabbit out.
And I was like, no, really needs to have the rabbit.
And so we ended up going on Craigslist and the Craigslist owner said, make me an offer.
And so it became this godfather joke that we had to make him an offer.
And so my friend who loves Marlon Brando said we have to name Marlon Brando.
And I said we have to name him Marlon Bundo.
That's a true story.
Who knew?
Who knew?
The true story of Marlon Bundo, A Day in the Life of the President by Charlotte Pence, and illustrated by Karen Pence, who looks exactly like you for some reason.
Yes.
You've probably related.
Yes.
I am very happy about that.
Yes, I don't blame you.
That's a good thing.
Thank you very much for coming on, Charlotte.
Good luck with the book.
I hope it does really well.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
It was nice talking to you.
Wow, what a well-raised young person.
And a fan of Another Kingdom, the most important thing that I have to relate.
She's a fan of Another Kingdom.
All right, stuff I like.
Stuff I love.
We're going to have to stop.
My wife hates that.
She's going to have to stop using that.
So I saw two underrated films in the last week or so that I thought got kind of just ignored.
One was Red Sparrow.
Now, I went to Red Sparrow because speaking to my wife, she was out of town, and I heard that Jennifer Lawrence did a nude scene in it.
John LeCarre's Spy World00:06:10
She does, it's great.
It is absolutely, it's one of the great, it's just an absolute great experience.
You know, they did this thing a long time ago.
I can't remember how long it was.
George Clooney was in a film called Solaris, and the film was lousy and they knew it.
So they started advertising the fact that at one point his butt was in the movie and it didn't matter.
Nobody went.
And one of my brothers said to me, they don't understand that, like, if women are watching a movie they like and George Clooney's butt is in it, that's kind of interesting.
But if men hear that some actress they like is going to do a nude scene, they will cancel their vacations to go see the movie.
That was the way I felt.
However, all that aside, it actually was, like all movies now, it's too long.
The one federal law I would support is a law that says movies cannot be over two hours long or you have to go wash my car.
That would just be one federal law is important.
It's two hours and 20 minutes.
It's too long.
But it's actually a good story.
It has people in it.
And it has a really interesting character played by Jennifer Lawrence, who is this ballerina who gets injured in the first scene.
And for reasons that I won't go into, she gets recruited to be a spy for the Russians, which is not a good experience.
I mean, it means that you have to use your body and it has to, you know, you have to be a cold, cool seductress to do what she does.
And she's a really good character and well played, I thought.
And here is the scene where she meets, who is it, Joel Edgerton, who is the American who is also looking for a mole in the Russian ranks.
Your uncle is a very powerful man.
In my country, if you don't matter to the men in power, you do not matter.
Hey, I'd like to see you again.
Why are we going to become friends?
Is that what you want?
I don't have any.
There's a Russian restaurant right by the opera.
Have dinner with me there.
Tomorrow a date.
Okay.
The reviewers ran the movie down because they said it was sexually exploitative.
It is, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
But what I really liked about it was it actually has characters.
Who do you trust?
You know, the actual real questions that come up in life, but told is a big spy story.
Who do you trust?
What can you count on?
What's the right thing to do?
The other film I saw is The Foreigner, which is also based on a novel called The Chinaman.
And this is more of an action movie.
But the story is this.
The IRA sets off a bomb in London.
A young girl is killed.
She's the daughter of an old Chinese immigrant, right?
60-year-old guy.
And the 60-year-old guy starts looking for answers.
The only thing about him is he's Jackie Chan.
And he's obviously a guy with skills.
And once they throw him out and say, get out of here, we have no answers, he comes back on him.
Here is Pierce Brosnan plays one of the IRA guys, and here's the scene where Jackie Chan confronts him.
I will ring a bomb.
Anyone comes in?
I touch the button, and we die.
No, give me the names.
I date Lambda the IRA, but I don't know who they really are.
I'm doing everything I can to find out who's responsible.
You're lying!
Who killed my daughter?
I'm sorry.
I truly don't know yet.
Pierce Brosnan is great in this, and he plays basically Jerry Adams.
He plays this IRA guy who has gone legit, and he's getting pressure from both the old IRA, who want to keep bombing people, and from the Brits who want him to straighten up and fly right.
And what makes the movie work is that Jackie Chan only appears in it from time to time.
Because these things are based on novels, they actually have better plots.
So he only appears in it from time to time.
And the rest of the story is about this political drama that's going on.
And it really is fun.
I like shoot-'em-ups.
So, you know, if you don't like shoot-em-ups, you might not like it, but I think it's really much better than I expected it to be in a really good one.
Which brings me to just this one point.
I know I'm always picking on superhero movies, but this is not the, my only point about this is spy movies, movies like this have big ideas in them.
They have politics in them.
I believe that the guy who wrote Red Sparrow is one of us, a conservative.
And the reason I believe it is he has quotes on his book from Vince Flynn and Nelson DeMille, who I know are more on the right wing.
And so it just has a sense of like how you become what John LeCorais said, you have to be a disgusted patriot.
And John LeCoré, who I thought was one of the truly best novelists of the Cold War, really understood the complexities of defending your country in ways that are not always savory.
So to be a spy, to be a CIA torturer like the lady who was about to take over the CIA, everybody's saying, oh, she used waterboarding on terrorists.
Now, I feel that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if it prevents terrorist attacks, but it is degrading to the person doing it as well as to the person it's being done by and the complexities of life, the fact that you have to do bad things in life, the fact that you have to do bad things to defend good things.
These are all the things that make you a grown-up, understanding this.
And I think it helps to have art that dramatizes these things, that people have to sometimes get their hands dirty.
Otherwise, you remain a child.
And if you remain a child, you will get on CNN and be interviewed about complex issues because they're children as well.
But I think these movies, spy movies, are so often a really good vehicle for discussing the fact that even in politics, even the people who are in the right sometimes have to be in the wrong.
Really good movies, Red Sparrow, Really Enjoyable, The Foreigner, both very enjoyable.
Not great films, but both really enjoyable.
If you want to sample some John LeCorae and you never have, you should either read Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy because he's a wonderful, wonderful writer until the Berlin Wall falls down, and then he becomes simplistic as well.
But while he's dealing with the vagaries and complexities of the Soviet Union, he was a great novelist.
Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy was made.
I know it was made into a movie recently, and I know I have friends who worked on that movie, but the really great one is the old 1979 miniseries made by the BBC with Alec Guinness.
His performance as Smiley is so great that John LeCre said he would never write another Smiley book because he couldn't get Alec Guinness out of his mind.
Smiling Through the Weekend00:02:34
And he was different than the guy in the book.
But Alec Guinness, one of the greatest actors of his generation.
Most people know him because he was Obi-Wan Kenobi, but he had a whole beautiful and fantastic career before that.
All right, the Clavenless Weekend now begins.
I know it's sad, but you too, like Charlotte Pence, could become another Kingdom fan and you could listen to that if you make it through the Clavenless Weekend.
We will be here on Monday and we will see you then.
Let us end with a woman who I think is one of the best jazz singers alive.
Most of the great jazz singers are dead, so that's maybe not the biggest, the biggest recommendation, but she's really wonderful.
Her name is Tierney Sutton, and here is one of her great recordings of one of my favorite songs, Where or When.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Survivors of the Clavinless Weekend gather here on Monday.
It seems we stood up like this before.
We've looked at each other in the same way then.
But I can't remember where or when the clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you're smiling, you are smiling then.
But I can't remember where or when some things that happen for the first time seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we had met before, left before.
but who knows where or when the Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Robert Sterling, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.