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Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire who has waged a secret, decade-long, multi-front legal battle against Gawker Media, has somewhat counterintuitively positioned himself as a guardian of free speech principles. But in response to Gawker’s critical coverage of the technology sector—coverage that Thiel has described as “terrible for the Valley”—he decided the company and the people who write for it deserved to be punished, with a campaign he has called “specific deterrence.”

Thiel wasn’t always so willing to discard his principles, though. Early in his career, he defended a fellow Stanford student (and future business partner) who had screamed “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” and “Can’t wait until you die, faggot!” to provoke college administrators, and decried the “punishment” of that student, which Thiel said at the time was designed to deter speech.

In January 1992, when Thiel was a third-year law student at Stanford Law School, a first-year law student named Keith Rabois shouted the epithets quoted above (as well as “Go ahead—try to kick me out of housing!”) in the direction of the on-campus residence of a Stanford lecturer named Dennis Matthies. Rabois later said his comments, though directed at Matthies, “were mostly about faggots being bad in general” and otherwise intended to challenge what he saw as Stanford’s overly restrictive rules regarding student speech. In a letter to The Stanford Daily, he wrote:

The entire point was expose [students] to very offensive speech. Admittedly, the comments made were not very articulate, not very intellectual, nor profound. The intention was for the speech to be outrageous enough to provoke a thought of “Wow, if he can say that, I guess I can say a little more than I thought.” ... I knew the speech was shocking, but clearly protected. My last comment, “Go ahead—try to kick me out of housing!” was designed to drive home the lesson that there was nothing except fear to stop criticism on this campus.

I don’t necessarily hate homosexuals, but do believe in Jack Kemp’s suggestion that they may not be the best teachers of young children in public schools and recognize that the spread of AIDS has a direct causal link back to their activity.

In the same letter, he declared his ability to wish disease and death upon gay people was a matter of free speech: “An official policy against particular kinds of speech [can] only chill constructive comments.”

After the Stanford administration publicized the incident, Rabois came under intense criticism not only for his comments, which could be easily interpreted as a death threat, but his own defense of his comments, in which he seemed to suggest that gay people were a danger to children and that gay sex, rather than years of willful neglect by public officials, was the primary reason for the rapid spread of H.I.V. The outcry eventually led Rabois to transfer to Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1994.

Throughout all of this, Rabois had a steadfast ally in Peter Thiel, who co-founded Stanford’s conservative journal, The Stanford Review, as an undergraduate in 1987. It’s unclear what Thiel wrote about the incident at the time it happened, since the Review’s online archives only go back to 1999 and the Stanford Library’s collection of the Review’s 1992 issues is currently unavailable online. But the year after Rabois graduated from Harvard, Thiel co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, in which he defended Rabois’ actions at length.

From Chapter 6 (title: “Welcome to Salem”):

For starters, his demonstration directly challenged one of the most fundamental taboos: To suggest a correlation between homosexual acts and AIDS implies that one of the multiculturalists’ favorite lifestyles is more prone to contracting the disease and that not all lifestyles are equally desirable. But by far the most troublesome aspect, to many of the multicultural observers, was Keith’s encouragement to other students to see what they could get away with: If others would follow his lead in saying what they thought, then the multicultural regime would be in serious trouble. And so, if for no other reason that deterrence, Keith would have to be punished, albeit necessarily outside the letter of the law.

Thiel and his co-author, a fellow Stanford graduate named David O. Sacks, saw the on-campus reaction—from students and administrators alike—as politically motivated revenge, an attempt to seize on Rabois’ most controversial statements to exact retribution for his record of conservative political speech:

Over the preceding four years (he had also attended Stanford as an undergraduate), Keith had acquired quite a reputation on campus—as an outspoken College Republican, an advocate for his fraternity, and a leading critic of Stanford’s administrators. None of these causes were popular with Stanford’s multiculturalists, and they could not pass up the perfect opportunity to exact some kind of revenge for the headaches Keith had caused them over the years, while simultaneously reconstituting the multicultural polity.

The reaction was undeniably harsh. In a letter that was later leaked to The Stanford Daily, the university’s dean of student affairs asked his colleagues to “join me in condemning” Rabois for his “meanness and viciousness.” Stanford’s president called his comments “vile” and “unworthy of Stanford.” A lawyer for Stanford’s general counsel wrote that she was “deeply disturbed that a person of Rabois’ character—and with his obvious disrespect for human dignity—may someday become qualified as a member of my profession.”

Students, for their part, erected posters bearing Rabois’ face and slogans such as “Homophobia Is Ugly.” Rabois’ law school classmates even organized a letter-writing drive to prevent him from obtaining an summer internship in California. According to The Stanford Daily, students attempted to alert every last law firm in the state of his comments. (After practicing corporate law for several years in the late 1990s, Rabois reunited with Thiel at the online payments startup PayPal, whose 2002 acquisition by eBay earned both men millions.)

Taken together, Thiel wrote, these statements and actions “reinforced the sense among the Stanford community that Keith was guilty of a truly heinous crime.” The true offenders, he argued, were Stanford’s “multiculturalists,” whose “convulsive reaction bore no relation to the offending action” yet had “concluded that their response had been perfectly even-handed; the punishment had fit the crime.” As for Rabois himself, Thiel acknowledged that screaming “Can’t wait until you die, faggot!” was “rude,” but not rude enough to warrant “months of public condemnation and ostracism.”

This forceful defense of Rabois is particularly noteworthy in light of the perception that Thiel’s years-long stealth legal war against Gawker Media is motivated by the fact that the company’s defunct Silicon Valley gossip site, Valleywag, once wrote about the fact that Thiel openly dates men. This claim is obviously untrue: Thiel has explicitly stated that he disliked Valleywag because it skewered him, his Silicon Valley friends, and their common dream to reshape the world in their own image.

Rabois shares his old friend’s view. In several tweets over the past few days, he’s referred to Gawker Media as “evil” and argued that the company deserves the “death penalty.” (In a momentary break of character, he acknowledged that material drawn from a sex tape can be newsworthy.) Still, Rabois doesn’t sense any tension between his free speech radicalism at Stanford and his stance toward Gawker today. “I don’t have any comment and haven’t commented on that in 24 years because I don’t see any relevance of something dumb I did at 22 to the modern world,” he wrote in an email to Gawker. In the same email, he added that “I am not as an anti-Gawker as you presuppose” and acknowledged that “Valleywag published some interesting posts over the years.”

For his part, Thiel has expressed regret, here and there, for his defense of Rabois. In 2006, he told a Bloomberg reporter that while he thought Rabois’s actions were “offensive and stupid” (in the reporter’s words), “the extreme reaction to it was not quite proportionate to what happened.” According to a 2011 profile in The New Yorker, Thiel “wishes he’d never written about the Rabois incident.” He told the magazine, “All of the identity-related things are in my mind much more nuanced.”

It’s unclear whether Thiel actually changed his mind about Rabois, or if he simply regrets airing his opinion about him. He didn’t respond to our requests for clarification. But there’s at least one clue that his views toward “political correctness” have not evolved that much. The billionaire now supports Donald Trump.