At a town hall in Pella, Iowa, on Friday, 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy declared “our diversity is not our strength,” compared a Black congresswoman to the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and compared the existence of white supremacy in the United States to that of unicorns.

“I'm sure the boogeyman white supremacist exists somewhere in America. I've just never met him. Never seen one, never met one in my life, right?” Ramaswamy said at a lunch hosted by the local county’s Republican Party. “Maybe I'll meet a unicorn sooner. And maybe those exist, too.”

Barely 24 hours later, a white gunman armed with a handgun and an AR-15 adorned with swastikas entered a dollar store in Jacksonville, Florida, and killed three Black people before taking his own life.

According to police, the shooter detailed his bigotry and hatred of Black people in three manifestos he left behind. And a nearby historic Black university said in a statement the shooter had come to their campus prior to traveling to the dollar store, though it was unclear if the university was a potential target.

“He targeted a certain group of people and that's Black people. That's what he said he wanted to kill. And that's very clear,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said at a press conference on Saturday. “And I don't know that the targets were specific, but I know that any member of that race at that time was in danger. Of the Black race.”

On Sunday, Ramaswamy defended his insistence that white supremacy was not a significant factor in American politics and instead blamed the media, academia and politicians for focusing too much on race and creating a “racialized culture… right as the last few burning embers of racism were burning out.”

“I was responding to a question where someone asked me what racism have I experienced in recent years? And I answered honestly: most of that racism has come from the modern left,” said Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The tech entrepreneur pointed to a left-wing commentator who made a pun out of his last name and to years-old comments by progressive Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., airing her frustrations about Black leaders she viewed as inadequately advocating for the Black community.

“I acknowledge that all forms of racial animus exist in the United States, including fringe branches, as clearly what was at the head of this mentally deranged individual responsible for this shooting,” Ramaswamy continued. “But I think there are many forms of mental derangement that cause us to see one another on the basis of our skin color and attributes.”

Ramaswamy argued using the history of racial discrimination in the U.S. to inform policy was discrimination in its own form and that a “colorblind meritocracy” is the only path forward.

In both the CNN interview and a separate interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ramaswamy blamed the country’s mental health crisis as a larger factor contributing to the shooting than racism. And on NBC, he deflected questions about the racist manifestos uncovered by law enforcement in the Jacksonville shooting investigation by complaining about a double standard for mass shooter manifestos. 

He pointed to a shooting in Tennessee earlier this year, where a shooter entered a private Christian school and shot three 9-year-olds and three adults. Nashville police said they would release the manifesto, but only after the completion of their investigation, to the frustration of Republicans and media organizations. Ramaswamy and others on the right have connected the shooting to the gender identity of the shooter, who police have indicated may have been transgender, but officials have not said if it was a factor in the shooting and any evidence of a motive is not yet public.

The lack of detail on the Nashville shooter’s motivations “is the best evidence of real politicization in terms of what the public sees and what the public doesn't,” Ramaswamy said on NBC. “I want to apply one standard for everybody. I don't want to look at this through partisan goggles.”

When asked by “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd about the higher rate of race-based violent crimes among the American right-wing compared to the country’s left, Ramaswamy pivoted to discussing crime in Democratic-run areas of the country and said there should be an effort not to politicize the Jacksonville shooting.

According to officials, the Jacksonville shooter was motivated by a racist, right-wing political ideology and paid homage to the genocidal regime of Nazi Germany by drawing swastikas on the AR-15 he used to murder three Black people in broad daylight.

Ramaswamy also defended comparing Pressley, who is Black, and a popular Black author, Ibram Kendi, to the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan at the same Friday event in Iowa. 

In 2019, Pressley said at an event “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice” and “we don’t need any more Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice,” according to the Washington Post. She later said she was trying to say she wanted leaders to use their lived experience to inform their decisions and policies and not ignore the realities of race.

For this rhetoric, Ramaswamy argued, Pressley was the modern version of the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that terrorized Black and minority Americans for decades. Or as CNN anchor Dana Bash put it, “they lynched people, they murdered people, they raped people, they burned their homes.”

“And that was wrong. That was obviously wrong,” Ramaswamy responded.

But he did not retract his comments.

“I stand by what I said to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” Ramaswamy said, continuing to make the case that discussion of racial identity is a main driver of racial animosity in the U.S. “There are many Americans today who are deeply frustrated by the new culture of anti-racism that’s really racism in new clothing and we need to have that debate in the open.”

House Democratic leadership issued a statement on the Jacksonville shooting that broadly condemned rhetoric from certain candidates and elected officials — though they did not call anyone out by name — while also calling for gun reform and asking the Justice Department to “aggressively investigate violent extremists in our society.”

“The racist shooting in Jacksonville is the inevitable consequence of reckless public officials who coddle right-wing extremists, whitewash painful parts of our history and flood our communities with weapons of war,” wrote the top four House Democrats, led by New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, in a statement. “Neo-Nazis are armed to the teeth and marching in our streets. No one in America is safe unless everyone is safe.”

“Elected officials and presidential candidates who peddle poisonous attacks on our diverse society, target historically vulnerable groups, ban books and minimize the pain caused by organized terrorists like the KKK are recklessly fanning the flames of racial hatred,” the Democrats added. “They must cease and desist their dangerous actions immediately.”

The shooting in Jacksonville followed a number of racially motivated mass killings in the U.S. in recent years: 10 Black people killed at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., last year; 23 killed by a gunman targeting Hispanics and immigrants at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019; 11 Jews killed at their Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 by a gunman who desired a genocide; and nine Black parishioners killed in Charleston, S.C., church in 2015 by an avowed white supremacist.