Indianola, Iowa - Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is facing criticism after comparing Democratic Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, a Black woman, to "modern grand wizards" of the Ku Klux Klan.

Ramaswamy criticized Pressley at a Friday campaign event in Iowa over 2019 remarks in which she said the US doesn't "need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice."

The 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur attacked Pressley's comments as racist. He then called her and celebrated author and anti-racism activist Dr. Ibram X. Kendi the "modern grand wizards of the modern KKK" – remarks the Massachusetts Democrat has condemned as offensive and dangerous amid a climate of rising anti-Black violence.

"It is not that long ago that we were besieged by images of white supremacists carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville. It was not that long ago that a white supremacist mob seized the Capitol, waving Confederate flags and erecting nooses on the West Lawn of the Capitol," Pressley told Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC's Politics Nation on Sunday.

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Pressley's own "ancestors and living family members have been brutalized, lynched, raped by the Ku Klux Klan," she added.

Ramaswamy has since doubled down on his hateful rhetoric, posting a video with quotes from Pressley and Kendi to X along with the text, "It's racist. It'd make the Grand Wizard of the KKK proud. It’s driving reactionary attacks. It needs to end."

"There's nothing more racist than to assume the color of someone's skin predicts something about the content of their viewpoints. Time to end the weaponization of race," he wrote in another post, apparently without following his own advice.

The GOP hopeful's comments came as people around the nation commemorated the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic I Have a Dream speech.