The Whole Foods CEO Has A Bizarre Government Conspiracy Theory

There are a lot of things you might expect to find at your neighborhood Whole Foods: someone in cycling gear stocking up on protein bars; aisles lined with vegetables that have been dried and seasoned, packaged into stylish bags, and labeled as "chips;" and people in Birkenstocks bogarting all the cashews in the bulk section, for example. What you probably wouldn't expect, however, is an underlying current of political conspiracy trickling down from the desk of the market chain's CEO, John Mackey. 

In an episode of the "Reason" podcast this week, the organic food businessman used the libertarian platform to let off steam about his issues with socialism. While Mackey has never been shy about his yen for capitalism (he famously co-authored a book on "conscious capitalism" and participated in turning the term and its credo into a nonprofit organization), the CEO's disdain toward anti-corporation ideologies has proven to be a bit more under the radar until now. 

"My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over," Mackey said in an August 10 episode of Reason. As the CEO continued his thought, he betrayed a full-on conspiracy about the far left. "They're marching through the institutions. They're...taking over education. It looks like they've taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they've taken over the military," he went on. To borrow some phrasing from Mackey's claims, "it looks like" his opinions about socialism have been festering for quite a while. 

As a subsidiary of Amazon, Whole Foods has come head to head with social democratic leaders, like Bernie Sanders, and other champions of the company's labor movement, per the Austin Chronicle. Mackey's anti-union stance goes back to the 1990s, when he penned Whole Foods' "Beyond Unions" statement that reads, "Unions are not part of the solution at Whole Foods Market" (via Forbes). 

In the months since Mackey announced his retirement, the CEO has become even more vocal about his political views. On "Reason," he revealed that he has "muzzled" himself ever since he received pushback for controversial remarks he's made within the last several years, such as his comparison of Obamacare to fascism. With only a few weeks left on his tenure, Mackey is spilling the (organic) beans.