GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has sparked a firestorm with comments comparing Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Black Democrat representing Massachusetts, to “modern grand wizards” of the Ku Klux Klan.  

Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old businessman who has been running a GOP campaign in the mode of a millennial Donald Trump, initially made the remark Friday during a campaign stop in Iowa before doubling down in the face of criticism Sunday and Monday.

“Republicans seem to have decided that in order to stop Democrats, they have to stop Black women,” Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, an organization focused on mobilizing Black voters, told The Hill.

“We’re not rewriting history or turning it on its head to suggest that a ‘grand wizard’ is anything other than what it is,” Shropshire said. “This language has never been about persuading Black voters. It is about stirring the racist stew that they have cooked up in their party and throwing it at Black women.”

The fight started when Ramaswamy on Friday in Iowa criticized remarks Pressley made in 2019 as racist. Pressley at the time during an event at Netroots Nation, a liberal conference said that Democrats don’t “need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice.”

Pressley’s spokesperson at the time told The Washington Post that Pressley’s point was that “diversity at the table doesn’t matter if there’s not real diversity in policy.”

On Sunday, after Pressley ripped him for the remarks, Ramaswamy said he brought up the 2019 comments “to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” he told CNN’s “Inside Politics.”

Pressley had hit back at Ramaswamy’s comparison on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” over the weekend, calling “the verbal assault” from the presidential hopeful “shameful” and “dangerous.”   

“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 the host, the Rev. Al Sharpton.

She added that her “ancestors and living family members have been brutalized, lynched, raped by the Ku Klux Klan.”