By M.D. Kittle

MADISON — While Wisconsin farmers worry how they’re going to get through a planting season with skyrocketing fuel and fertilizer prices, Gov. Tony Evers’ Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection is leading Equity and Inclusion Peace Circles.

Yes, it’s as insipid as it sounds.

Last week, the agency’s Equity and Inclusion Advisory Committee held a “special meeting.” What was so urgent?

The Equity team had to review and take action on a “recommendation towards operational management of Peace Circle activity.”

What the hell is that?

“We are working on a pilot project that allows small groups (of) staff to (express) thoughts around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion topics,” Kevin Plante, of DATCP’s

Division of Agricultural Development, wrote in an email response to Empower Wisconsin’s questions.

The concept, Plante says, “originates from Indigenous Americans.”

By one definition, the peacemaking circle “is a process that brings together individuals who wish to engage in conflict resolution, healing, support, decision making or other activities in which honest communications, relationship development, and community building are core desired outcomes.”

Liberal Minnesota prosecutors reportedly used Peacemaking Talking Circles to administer justice to a longtime Native American activist who toppled the Christopher Columbus statue in front of the Minnesota State Capitol. He was part of the lawlessness portrayed as social justice following the death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer.

The circles would “explore the underlying reasons for and the impact of the actions that led to the charges in this matter, and to bring forth value-driven recommendations from the community about what would be the most meaningful way to restore harms resulting from these actions,” according to court documents.

The activist got 100 hours of community service and was made to apologize for breaking the law. But the state made concessions, too, according to Indian Country Today.

“Citing the perspectives that emerged from the circles, prosecutors admitted that the ‘violence, exploitation and forced assimilation that has been inflicted upon Native people’ caused trauma that is still palpable and that ‘the impact of those harms is largely unrecognized by or unknown to the dominant culture.’ Further, prosecutors admitted to ‘the failure of public systems’ to address decades of calls to remove the statue,” reporter Stewart Huntington wrote for the publication.

Evers has spent his term as governor institutionalizing leftist initiatives driven by race-centric “equity” concepts. He created the Governor’s Advisory Council on Equity and Inclusion to “provide strategic guidance to the governor, lieutenant governor, and Department of Administration … in developing a sustainable framework to promote and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion practices across Wisconsin state government.”

The Democrat required every state agency to prioritize his leftist agenda.

So, while the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection creates and figures out how to manage “peace circles,” farmers and others in Wisconsin’s critical $105 billion agribusiness industry are struggling with inflationary pressures not seen in 40 years.