At a group meeting, the investigator, Derron Borders, lamented that the assassination of two Israeli embassy staffers would not spark a broader ‘movement’
An investigator in Kansas State University’s civil rights office, which claims to foster an “environment free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation,” is part of a secretive Marxist book club that calls for the “total destruction” of Israel, hails the terrorist group Hamas, and defends the murders of Israeli civilians.
Derron Borders, who joined the university’s civil rights and Title IX office in May 2024, is a member of the Kansas Socialist Book Club, an anti-colonial Marxist group based in Manhattan, Kansas, the Washington Free Beacon has found.
The organization, formed in 2022, has embraced extremist views on Israel over the Jewish state’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks from Hamas. In a manifesto last year, the Kansas Socialist Book Club called for the “complete and total destruction” of Israel and expressed “unwavering support” for Hamas.
“We remain steadfast in our support of Palestinian liberation, whatever that ends up looking like,” the organization’s manifesto says. The group also defends the slaughter of Israeli civilians, referred to in the manifesto as the “Zionist middle class.”
“We have no sympathy for their casualties or losses,” proclaimed the club, which also signed an open letter with other radical groups that defended Elias Rodriguez, the left-wing activist who assassinated Israeli embassy employees Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on May 21.
While the Kansas Socialist Book Club does not disclose its members, several clues point to Borders’s involvement in the book club. Borders is one of the book club’s five followers on GitHub, a web development platform the group uses for its website. He is also co-secretary of the Flint Hills Democratic Socialists of America, a Kansas-based affiliate of DSA that has hosted events with the Kansas Socialist Book Club.
Borders wrote an academic paper titled, “Raising class consciousness: Adult learning in a socialist book club,” for the American Association For Adult and Continuing Education, according to his online résumé, which also identifies him as the founder of the Coalition for Fat Identities.
Borders took part in a May 30 virtual meeting in which the book club discussed Rodriguez’s killings, according to a video recording of the meeting reviewed by the Free Beacon. He used his first name and an avatar of “The Little Prince,” a French cartoon of which Borders is a fan, during the call.
Borders expressed trepidation toward Rodriguez’s attack, not because the Chicago man killed innocent Jews, but because the killings were unlikely to spark a “movement” against the “capitalist regime.”
“Most of the time Christian Zionists are not as belligerent as Israeli Zionists, and so it’s really hard to get at a Zionist and them not also be Jewish,” he said. Borders also lamented that the shooting did not have a “class consciousness” component to it and would likely not serve as a useful critique of the “imperialist, capitalist regime.”
“It feels like a temporary blip, and I don’t think much movement’s going to come from this,” Borders said. “The amount of talking about class consciousness from this is not going to be as comparable as it is … to [assassin of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson] Luigi Mangione.”
The Kansas Socialist Book Club hailed Mangione’s actions in another manifesto, writing that “the former CEO of United Healthcare was disposed of by a brave anonymous soul.”
The moderator of the May 30 Kansas Socialist Book Club discussion about the D.C. shooting mocked Lischinsky, the murdered Israeli diplomat, as “the blonde Christian man from Germany doing a genocide.” Lischinsky was born in Germany, but moved to Israel as a teenager and joined the Israel Defense Forces.
Borders’s affiliation with the Kansas Socialist Book Club could raise concerns at Kansas State, especially given the nature of his position at an office tasked with investigating complaints about harassment based on race, ethnicity, and religion. The Trump administration has already placed sanctions on schools that enable anti-Semitic activity, as well as those that promote DEI initiatives like those at the Kansas State office.
The university’s Civil Rights and Title IX office, which in December changed its name from the Office of Institutional Equity, touted Borders’s “wealth of experience” in the field of civil rights in an announcement last year. That “experience” includes a role as director of diversity and inclusion at Cornell University, where Borders came under fire after the New York Post reported that he defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack as “resistance” against what he called “settler colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy.”
Neither Borders nor the Kansas Socialist Book Club responded to Free Beacon requests for comment. The group made the video of its May 30 meeting private and began deleting entries on its website—including the manifesto—after the Free Beacon reached out. Kansas State University, which starts its fall semester on Monday, did not respond to requests for comment either.
