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In response to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee firmly believes that “all lives matter“—which completely misses the point, but, whatever. Now, he seems to have changed is mind, but not in the way you’d think. According to Huckabee, the cause we all need to be rallying around is “Male Lives Matter.”
“More white people have been shot by police officers this past year than minorities,” Huckabee said in an interview with Fox News on Saturday, July 9 in response to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men who were killed by police within 48 hours of each other.
.@GovMikeHuckabee: "More white people have been shot by police officers this past year than minorities."https://t.co/18MRYEm5u9
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 9, 2016
Huckabee, who was briefly a candidate for president in the upcoming election, was referring to an investigation conducted by the Washington Post, which shows out of the 990 people shot by police in 2015, 948 were men. Of those men, 494 were white and 258 were black.
“If we have a shooting, we end up assuming that it had to be racial,” he said. “Leaders have a responsibility to keep things in perspective.”
However, it was Huckabee who failed to keep things in perspective, as Michelle Ye Hee Lee, a reporter at the Post, pointed out.
“As we often warn readers, criminal justice trends generally are calculated by rate, rather than raw numbers,” she wrote. “A per capita calculation of crime gives a more accurate representation of the risk of certain crimes to a community, rather than raw numbers. In this case, looking at crimes simply as the raw number of white people affected vs. the number of minorities affected is misleading. By definition, there are fewer minorities.”
And, with fewer minorities in the country, naturally, fewer will make up victims of police brutality. When Ye Hee Lee reached out to Huckabee for comment, he said through a spokesperson:
“It’s not me that needs to be ‘fact checked.’ It’s the Post — I only said exactly what YOU reported. My comments were 100 percent factual. The pure facts also reveal that 94 percent of those killed by police are men, so by your ‘proportional’ standards, the real movement in America should be ‘Male Lives Matter.'”
You heard it here first, folks. Apparently, the real victims in this white, patriarchal society are white men. Talk about a plot twist.
