When news broke Friday morning that Hulk Hogan had been airbrushed out of the history of WWE via a series of deletions on the wrestling company’s website, it was clear that some bad news was about to hit the Hulkster. And there were, frankly, a very limited number of things he could’ve done to elicit such a strong reaction: he either murdered someone in cold blood on camera or he violated a cultural norm so resonant that it necessitated disappearing him altogether.

Well, the murder didn’t seem terribly likely, given that we probably would’ve gotten wind of the story after he’d been arrested. What cultural norm could’ve been violated? Considering that, over the years, he’d already been caught up in a sex tape scandal and a steroid scandal and a decades-long No One Likes Hulk Hogan In The Locker Room scandal, it had to be something especially bad. And, frankly, the only sort of scandals that call for someone being disavowed entirely are those that involve slurs. So I guessed/joked:

I wonder if Hulk Hogan used a bad word. I'm guessing he used a bad word. Bad words will not be tolerated. — Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) July 24, 2015

Lo and behold, not 20 minutes later, I saw* my guess was right. Weird Twitter was … nonplussed. Now, that is a relatively inaccurate description of events, insofar as my tweet was meant as a prediction, not a reaction. Then again, Gawker appears to have updated their story before the Post did. Since I make a point of not reading Gawker these days in an effort to send as few clicks as possible their way following their gross behavior last week—a stance everyone I follow on Twitter seems to have adopted, given none of them linked to the story in my feed—I’m probably to blame for the confusion.

The point is, though, that the tweet wasn’t wrong. Hulk Hogan did, in fact, get airbrushed out of the (WWE) history books because he said bad words. It may have been incomplete, in that he also had bad thoughts. But that’s literally the extent to the wrongs committed by Hogan here: He said a word that we, as a society, have more or less forbidden and professed thoughts that we, as a society, rightly consider to be wrong. He didn’t, say, run a black guy over because he thought he was defiling his precious baby. He didn’t, say, fire a black guy because he doesn’t like the color of his skin.

Nope. He said bad words. He thought bad thoughts.

Now, the WWE was well within its rights to let Hogan go. Indeed, it probably would have been negligent corporate management not to. The first four hours of the story might have been "Elderly wrestler admits to racist thoughts 12 years ago on a purloined sex tape," but the next 40 would’ve been "When will major corporation cut ties with elderly racist wrestler who said bad words 12 years ago and quickly apologized for it." Social media, an area the WWE spends a lot of effort cultivating, would’ve gone bananas. This is the age in which we live.

Still, it rankles a bit to hear those on the left "lolz what’s the problem free market bro" even as they would deny that exact freedom in other circumstances. The kerfuffle called to mind a post a couple days back by Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex about the current nature of free speech on the Internet. The whole thing is worth reading and a bit hard to summarize briefly, but the gist of it is that the libertarian ideal of a thousand entities competing with each other for business and succeeding or failing on the strength of their policies is a pipedream. Rather, we have a few giant corporations that operate with minimal oversight from anyone other than their internal leaders and can do massive damage to anyone they (or the anger mobs) decide to memory hole. I get the sense that the hypocrisy mentioned above grates on Alexander too:

We don’t trust the free market to necessarily preserve racial equality—that’s what anti-discrimination laws are for. We don’t trust the free market to necessarily preserve worker safety—that’s what OSHA and related regulations are for. We don’t even trust the free market to necessarily preserve fire safety—that’s why federal inspectors have to come in every so often to make sure you’re not secretly plotting to let your employees fry. Whenever we think something is important, we regulate the hell out of it, rights-of-private-companies to-set-their-own-policies be damned. But free speech? If you don’t trust the free market to sort it out, the only possible explanation is that you just don’t understand the literal text of the First Amendment.

The idea of an OSHA-style bureaucracy protecting free speech freedoms presents its own ridiculous problems, not the least of which is the fact that any effort to protect freedom of speech by employees at the workplace would necessarily curtail freedom of speech and association for employers. Still, it’s worth highlighting the hypocrisy.

The larger goal, in Alexander’s mind, is to brand a broad swathe of society untouchable:

The worst possible end-game for this is the two-tier marketplace of ideas mentioned above, with an unfortunate twist—everyone knows that the second tier is inhabited entirely by witches, and therefore being on the second tier is sufficient to convict you. Unpopular ideas are gradually forced out of the first tier by media smear campaigns, and from then on everyone believes the effort was justified, because it’s one of those second-tier ideas that you only find in the same sites as the racists and trolls and child pornographers. You’re not a second tier kind of person, are you? No, we didn’t think so.

Those who instigate outrage mobs aimed at getting people fired—the sort of people WWE was wisely trying to avoid by taking preemptive action against Hogan—are interested in bringing that two-tier mentality to the real world. Jon Ronson ably highlights the actions of these people in his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. We can argue all day over who deserves to be subjected such campaigns; I tend to think Ronson missteps when he lumps a quote fabricator and self-plagiarist like Jonah Lehrer in with someone like Justine Sacco. A Gawker writer who outs a guy and aids in his extortion probably has it coming in a way that Tim Hunt clearly doesn’t.

At the very least, though, the examples above were all public statements/actions in a way that Hogan’s misdeeds clearly were not. Hogan did not hop on Facebook to share his views about his daughter having sex with a black guy. He did not take to a WWE ring and pronounce to the world "I’m racist." He said those bad words and professed those bad thoughts on a private videotape that was provided to a reviled website under questionable circumstances, a website whose very existence is now threatened** for publishing portions of said tape under the guise of "journalism."

Hogan’s now a second tier person. And the attacks on him help us understand why some people prefer anonymity these days. It is telling how frustrated would-be rage-mobbers get when they can’t consign those they disagree with to that second tier:

This isn’t an idle question, naturally; Stern wants to generate a campaign of outrage in order to force the funders of the Federalist to shutter the site. After all, it promulgates bad thoughts. It writes bad words. And bad thoughts and bad words should not be tolerated in our decent society. The Federalist is a second-tier kind of joint. You’re not a second tier kind of person, are you?

I sure hope not. You know what we do to second tier types, after all.

(And on that cheery note, allow me to bid you goodbye for a couple of weeks. I’m taking some paternity leave. Behave yourselves while I’m gone and please send complaints about typos and the such to @BiffDiddle.)

*Well, technically, I heard my guess was right, as my wife read the update to me in the car as we were driving back from a doctor’s appointment.

**It is awfully convenient that portions of the tape damaging Hogan’s popularity were to leak shortly after Gawker’s own popularity took a particularly sharp nosedive.