Vivek Ramaswamy rails against 'intellectual wokeism' dubbing it a 'cancer' on society

The Presidential candidate told delegates at the conference: "One of the origins of the spread of woke capitalism was actually the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

"I remember it because I got my first job in the fall of 2007 in NYC at a hedge fund. Pretty interesting time to get a first job in finance.

"What happened in the aftermath was we saw the beginnings of what would have been a system of creative destruction. However, the government - and I think the bureaucracy within that government - intervened to prevent that creative destruction from happening.

"Which gave fuel, moral justification, for the left to then say, 'We're going to occupy Wall Street'. You might remember that movement."

Ramaswamy continued: "They said they were going to redistribute money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and give it to poor people, if the whole thing were nationalised in order to stop that creative destruction from playing out.

"But what happened then - and this is part of the origin story about when woke capitalism was born - Wall Street had a clever choice to make.

"To say, we will adopt certain of the norms of that left wing backlash - climatism, covidism today, wokism, racial wokeism, having token minorities on boards, musing about the racially disparate impact of climate change after flying on that private jet.

"We will do these things as financial institutions, we will implement agendas through the backdoors that government couldn't quite implement through the front door, such cultural agendas.

"But we won't do it for free. We effectively expect the Occupy Wall Street movement to go away. and it did. and it turns out that other institutions in corporate life began to do the same thing."

"This theme of creative destruction - it was in some ways the prevention of bureaucratic destruction that gave the intellectual left the appearance of cohesion."

Arc was established as "an international community with a vision for a better world".

Its mission is to generate a new approach to society, which would allow everyone to "prosper, contribute and flourish".

Addressing the conference earlier today, Sir Paul Marshall - a shareholder and director of GB News - hit out at "woke capitalism", saying it is a phenomenon endorsed by "politically motivated bureaucrats".

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He also hit out against "financial cronyism", warning that it would cause free market capitalism to "end in a form of corporatism similar to socialism".

Addressing what he sees to be hindrances to its functioning, Marshall told delegates: "The third mutant sibling is woke capitalism.

"Woke capitalism is the imposition of a top-down ideology onto the free market system by politically motivated bureaucrats either from the public or the private sector.

"Their ideology is framed through ESG. In some cases, there is also a garnish of diversity, equity and inclusion."