Taylor Swift vs. Scooter Braun: Bad Blood

When Stochastic Violence Gets Sexy

I always used to argue with my ex-wife about Taylor Swift, because she was always irrationally jealous that I might have a crush on Taylor. It was always baffling to me, because as much as I admire Taylor as both a musician and a businesswoman, I’m terrified of Taylor Swift as a human being because I recognize her as exactly what she is: a narcissistic billionaire psychopath who is able to manipulate her legions of insane fans in a way very similar to Donald Trump. That’s why it was so gratifying to see the HBO documentary Taylor Swift vs. Scooter Braun: Bad Blood. Most of the documentaries about Taylor Swift are fawning puff pieces, so it was refreshing to see a more hard-hitting expose that touches on Taylor’s personal flaws.

It may sound weird to suggest that one of the best-loved celebrities in America is a ruthless Machiavellian who would cheerfully murder her own fans if she could get more money or clout out of it, but when you consider her patterns of behavior, you’ll frequently notice bizarre inconsistencies between the public face that she displays to people and her behavior behind the scenes. My suspicions about Taylor were first aroused at the VMAs, where she rocketed to fame by using her infamous “white woman tears” to gain national fame after a neurodivergent black man named Kanye West (who happened to be heavily intoxicated at the time) made the mistake of questioning Taylor’s talents right on stage, comparing her unfavorably to Beyonce. It was a very tone-deaf move that didn’t take into account the prevailing cultural climate. If Kanye had done this a decade later during the heights of the BLM movement, then his faux pas wouldn’t have been criticized (and in fact might probably have been applauded) but back then, it was a very bad choice to be a black man who had a white woman crying and accusing you of victimizing her. Kanye was absolutely excoriated in the press (with even President Obama publicly criticizing him) while Taylor Swift became a household word. This incidentally also started the victimhood narrative that Taylor Swift has continued to build around herself: the story of how Taylor is a sweet innocent young woman who is constantly bullied and mistreated by evil men, but somehow always manages to rise above it all and rise victorious over her haters while conveniently making billions of dollars and buying two private jets. I know that to reasonable people like you or I, it sounds absolutely wild to imagine that a billionaire woman can be constantly oppressed and victimized by men who have substantially less power than she does in any relationship (whether business or personal), but please understand that I’m not joking at all here: this narrative is seriously what most Swifties believe.

Dark-triad personality types typically have an obsession with revenge, and the documentary does a great job of pointing out how Taylor would try to enact her revenge on Kanye years later, when the apologetic rapper would call her up to ask her permission to use a mildly offensive lyric about her in a song, saying “I made that bitch famous.” Sensing an opportunity to play the victimhood card again, Taylor privately gave Kanye permission to use the lyric, but after the song was released she publicly denied having done so, claiming to be a victim of Kanye’s misogyny. (Note the huge inconsistency between Taylor’s public face and her private behavior.) Unbeknownst to Taylor, however, Kanye’s wife Kim was a very savvy student of human behavior and secretly had recorded the call, already suspecting that Taylor would try to backstab Kanye this way. When Kim’s recording was released to the media, Taylor swiftly pivoted to say she gave Kanye permission to use a lyric claiming that he had made her famous, but that he hadn’t mentioned that the lyric would use the word “bitch.” Of course, we clever scholars can easily recognize this as the transparent lie that it is. First of all, it’s very disingenuous for a musician like Taylor to pretend that she has never in her life heard a rap song and is totally unaware of how they typically refer to women. A rapper calling women bitches?!? Who could ever have suspected such a thing?!? Second of all, if it was just the term “bitch” that Taylor objected to, then why hadn’t she explained that before Kim released the recording, instead of deliberately making it sound like Kanye hadn’t reached out to her at all? What Taylor was doing was a classic example of the Trickle Truth: a behavior that is very common among Dark Triad personalities.

This alone might not be enough to condemn Taylor as a manipulative and conniving little vixen, but time and time again she displays the same pattern of playing the victim while she is actually bullying people. For example, there is a man named Jack Sweeney who does the very valuable service of posting the locations and flight plans of celebrity jets. This allows the public to calculate how much carbon their jets emit, highlighting the hypocrisy of how the same people who are constantly claiming to be environmentalists are the ones most personally responsible for destroying the planet. I think that’s a useful public service, don’t you? We deserve to know what our elites are doing and whether they practice what they preach. However, Taylor got very upset about Jack’s important work because it made her look bad. Instead of taking a long hard look at her extensively documented past of environmental destruction, reflecting on her wrongdoing and deciding to change her ways, Taylor decided to sue Jack Sweeney (a college student) to intimidate him into stopping. That’s correct, a billionaire polluter decided that rather than stop polluting, she would prefer to sue a college student to get him to stop talking about her polluting. The idea that maybe she should stop committing her bad behavior if she didn’t want people to gossip about it seems never to have occurred to her.

Speaking of gossip, I suppose I should admit to reading the “SwiftlyNeutral” subreddit - a forum of like-minded people who like Taylor’s music, but are put off by the behavioral issues that plague this troubled starlet. Many of them there have noticed Taylor’s consistent pattern of lies, as well as the way she uses tears to manipulate her fans by faking emotional vulnerability. The documentary Bad Blood does a good job of highlighting that, showing clips of a younger Taylor talking about how she loved her record label, only to reverse her position years later. The documentary also does a great job of highlighting Taylor’s manipulative streak, and how she always tells people what they want to hear before stabbing them in the back. Even as a kid, she was manipulating people like this, and she is caught on tape at age 15 wrapping a record manager around her little finger by lying to him about how likable and suave he is. Honestly, I can’t blame Taylor for this one. Everyone knows that many influential men speaking to attractive women really want to believe that those women are attracted to them for their charisma rather than the opportunities of self-advancement that they offer. I imagine Conor Kennedy also thought that Taylor slept with him at 17 because he was incredibly charming, rather than because of his family name. Whether Taylor secretly slept with the record manager that the clip mentions isn’t discussed in the documentary, and that’s probably for the best.

Obviously, the documentary isn’t all focused on Taylor’s negative characteristics. As a passionate supporter of free speech, one of the character traits that I find admirable about Taylor Swift is something that she has in common with Donald Trump: namely a tendency to use stochastic violence against people who criticize her. This is demonstrated most vividly when Taylor had the opportunity to buy back her masters recordings at the end of her contract but decided not to because they were too expensive. Instead, she attempted to mobilize her fans against Scooter, using stochastic violence to incite them against Scooter and his family. This is almost identical to the way Donald Trump uses stochastic violence against his political opponents, and frankly it’s a very clever strategy. Some of the people who are familiar with my Q-anon activities think that my own propensity to use stochastic violence mimics Donald Trump, but that’s not true at all - in fact, the person I took my inspiration from there is actually Taylor Swift. Obviously I’m not a hot blonde billionaire woman so pretending to be the victim to rally angry people to my defense doesn’t work quite as well for me as it does for Taylor, but accusing people of pedophilia is a pretty decent substitute and is an analogous equivalent in my humble opinion. It used to be that accusing people of racism or sexism was the best way to stir up an angry lynch mob, but today that card has been overplayed (and as a white man it wouldn’t work for me anyway) so pedophile accusations are the new hotness.

While my review of Bad Blood is largely positive, there are a few things that it misses. First of all, the documentary fails to point out how Taylor Swift uses NDAs to silence her exes while spinning the public narrative to make them look like the bad guy. I think that’s pretty significant and something that most people would be very interested in. Secondly, despite being called “Bad Blood” the documentary didn’t address one of the more plausible rumors I’ve heard about Taylor: namely, that she has HIV and secretly infects her boyfriends with it, binding them to silence with those same NDAs. I suppose that given her extensive history of litigation again anybody who crosses her, it’s unsafe to make allegations about this without conclusive proof, but I feel that pointing out some of the more credible rumors (without commenting on their truth value) and allowing the audience to make up their own minds would have been a good way of handling this. However, no TV show is ever perfect, so despite these minor quibbles, overall I would consider Bad Blood a striking success and a must-watch documentary.

My Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars