Mike Huckabee said the real movement in America should be "male lives matter" given the number of male fatalities in police shootings.

The former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate made the remark as he battled The Washington Post, which reported on his comments in a TV appearance that "more white people have been shot by police officers this past year than minorities."

The Post noted that, proportionally, many more blacks than whites are killed in shootings involving the police.

That led to a statement from Huckabee.

ADVERTISEMENT

“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," Huckabee said in a statement through his spokesman to the Post.

"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,' " he said.

The newspaper reported that the former Arkansas governor appeared to cite its figures chronicling police shootings that found of 990 people shot last year, 948 were male, 494 were white and 258 were black.

The Post noted that criminal justice reform trends are generally calculated by rate instead of raw figures.

The Black Lives Matter movement has seen renewed debate following the Dallas shooting attack last week that left five police officers dead, which came after a pair of fatal police-involved shootings of black men.

Several conservatives have criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani arguing that the group is racist.