The Daily Signal - 'FAKE' CHRISTIAN? Conservative Leader Calls Out SPLC's Incoming CEO | Brad Dacus

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Brad Dacus, founder of the Pacific Justice Institute, joins the Daily Signal's Tyler O'Neil. Dacus is challenging Ryan Haygood, the incoming CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to a debate on whether PJI is a "hate group." Haygood quotes scripture in his LinkedIn biography, but Dacus considers it "disingenuous" for a leader of a nonprofit that demonizes traditional Christian beliefs to tout his Christian convictions. "It's really ironic he's calling himself a Christian and yet he goes out of his way to attack benevolent, loving Christian organizations because of their Christian beliefs and Christian worldview," Dacus said. "You can't declare yourself Christian on Sunday morning and go to church and then on Monday, be the enemy of Christians, Christian organizations and ministries because of their Christian biblical worldview. It's not real, it's fake, it's disingenuous." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Moment. Old Navy's drapeed denim wide leg. This is Tyler O'Neill with The Daily Signal. I'm honored to be joined by Brad Dacchus with the Pacific Justice Institute. He is officially, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-LGB-Q plus hate group. But this is a very interesting thing because the SPLC has an incoming president and CEO. who claims himself to be Christian. And so Brad has an offer for this incoming CEO.

Great to have you, Brad, and I'll just let you make your big announcement. You bet, Tyler, thank you for the opportunity. Now, we have Pacific Justice Institute. We believe in letting truths come to the surface and let things fall where they may. And that's what I said in the letter to the new president of SPLC, that we want to sit down, have an open, raw, unedited interview. We'll make that available to everyone. And so if they have a case against Pacific Justice Institute, bring it on.

But if they can't prove up their accusations that were a, quote, hate group, then let that also resonate as well. The bottom line is this organization, Tyler, as you well know, is a very, it's a racket. It's a money-making racket, and what they sell is hate and division, and that's how they make their money. They create new enemies, vilify new groups, and then they try, and their goal is not just to silence, but also to vilify and destroy. And I'm quoting the former president of their organization.

So it's been a very dark organization with terrible motives of silence, destruction, feeling hate, division, not communication, not understanding. And of course, we have Pacific Justice Institute with 37 offices coast to coast. We have 147 cases in litigation. We've been, for 30 years, have been defending religious freedom for everyone, parents' rights, for all parents

against the government, violating their rights as parents, sanctity of life, all without charge. So we're a very benevolent organization helping lots of people, and so it's very disturbing when we see this SPLC for so long, get away with just giving out false information and lies and stirring up hate against not only Pacific justice, but also against focus on the family, ADF, Liberty Council, American Family Association, and of course, wonderful individuals like these attacks like Charlie Kirk, Dr. James Dobson,

Ben Carson, even Franklin Graham. So if it's really ironic, he's calling himself a, quote, Christian, and yet he goes out of his way to attack benevolent-loving Christian organizations who are because of their Christian beliefs and Christian worldview exhibited to the love of Christ. Well, and I think that you really hit the nail on the head there, because over and over the SPLC has put conservative Christian organizations on this map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan calling conservative Christian groups anti-LGB plus hate groups. And it's all because they stand for traditional biblical Christian values. And I mean, these are the values that Christians have held since 2,000 years ago.

These are teachings from the Old and New Testaments about what sexual morality is. And it's not just saying that homosexual activity is sinful. It's also saying that, you know, the proper place for sexual activity overall is within marriage, and that God made humans male and female, and this notion that you can change your biological sex by identifying with the sex opposite your biological sex is just entirely against that Christian tradition. The SPLC says, if you take these traditional stances, you are inherently hateful. And the SPLC long said, oh, we're not anti-Christian. And the only evidence they ever gave for that was that they didn't put focus on the family on their hate map.

And then last year, lo and behold, they took that language from their website saying, this is why we are not anti-Christian, off their website. And then they put focus on the family on the website, which I thought was very revealing to me. We also saw this video with R.J. Cravens come out and say that it is both false and dangerous to believe that you can't be truly Christian and identify as LGBTQ. These statements from an organization that now is going to have a man who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve as a CEO and president. And, you know, I'm all for true Christians who believe the gospel leading organizations like this one. But I think there's a big disconnect there.

And your letter, I thought, put it very strongly. What message do you have to someone who claims to be a Christian but would lead an organization that arguably is anti-Christian? Oh, you back. You know, it's, you know, you can't, like, declare yourself a Christian on Sunday morning and go to church. And then on Monday, be the enemy of Christians, Christian organizations and ministries because of their Christian biblical worldview. It is, it's not real. It's fake. It's disingenuous. These are, you know, gracious terms, in my opinion, to describe it. But, you know, we know that, like, for example, in Second Timothy chapter three, there's a clear warning. I do a lot of guest preaching at churches. And one of the points I make in that chapter is it talks all about how in the last days we're going to have enemies. We're going to have people who claim to be on our side, but they tell people what they want to hear. They take, you know, satisfying their itching, if you will is what the scripture says.

And, you know, it says, stay away from these people. These people are trying to invade the church and bring down truth and the message of true Christianity. And unfortunately, that is what I'm afraid we're having now. Now, mind you, I'm very open and I'm very forgiving. And I'm so if Southern Poverty Law Center and this new leader steps back and says, wait a minute, we have gone off course. We started off doing good things opposing the KKK.

but then our organization was greedy to keep our purpose after the KKK was pretty much snuffed out. So we created these other new groups to hate that we shouldn't and created false information. I think about it said, this was wrong and apologized and say, we're taking you off Pacific Justice and all these other organizations. And we're not going to vilify people like Charlie Kirk and Dr. James Dobs, etc. I say fantastic. Kumbaya, I'm ready to work with them and see how we can possibly come together on some positive things. I mean, that's my attitude.

Christianity is about a lot of grace and forgiveness. I'm ready for that. Unfortunately, the messaging of Southern Poverty Law Center is not about reconciliation. It's about silencing and preventing reconciliation, preventing truth so they can maintain their mantra to raise money and raise millions and millions of dollars from people who have no idea of what the truth is.

That's my goal. That's why I'm challenging this new director. I hope he does the right thing. I'm open, and I'm open to meeting with him and having a one-on-one open discussion. I'm not sure I'm going to get that, but if he's true about his faith, then read Matthew 18.

There's a clear exhortation there of what people who are truly of the face should do when they disagree. And that's to meet face-to-face and to address the issue. So the SPLC started as a public interest legal foundation. very similar, ironically, to Pacific Justice Institute and the American Freedom Law Center and ADF and all of these public interest legal institutions that do what the SPLC originally started to do. What would you call on the SPLC to return to?

And if I may, I mean, I think the main issue here is that, you know, the SPLC is pushing. this claim that you guys are hateful, and it's arguably undermining the very good work that the SPLC itself was founded to do, which is provide legal services to people who most need them. Yeah, this organization, they need to realize that when they're not just attacking Pacific Justice Institute and these other organizations, they're attacking virtually everyone in America who believes that the Bible is God's Word. They're attacking the conduits of God's word, the Apostle Paul, the writings of the Apostle Paul,

and Peter and the Scriptures, and not just the Old Testament, but the New Testament in what it says about these different issues about marriage and about sex before marriage and by anything outside, traditional marriage. It's very clear cut. So when they attack Pacific Justice and others, like us, they're also attacking every, just the overwhelming majority of Americans who hold dear to the Christian faith

and believing that the Bible is God's word. It's really actually very extreme out of touch and how they do it, which is to silence and destroy, means that their methodology is not just to go after us. At the end of the day, it's going to go after and silence every single true person of faith, through Christian in the United States that is not willing to bow the knee to this new God they're creating with regard to this radical

hate-filled device of agenda. And so those specific claims that the SPLC has against you, you know, I almost want to give a little bit of a preview, if you will, if the SPLC did agree, and I doubt they

will, but if they do agree to have this discussion, what would you say in response to You know, they have these really more than a decade old claims against Pacific Justice that they say justify putting you on a map with chapters of the KKK, that they say, you know, this shows the infrastructure upholding white supremacy, which last I checked, you know, standing for biblical values has nothing to do with white supremacy. But how do you respond? I mean, they have claims about you making comparisons with Hitler. they have claims about what they say is a false story about a transgender person engaging in hostility against other people who disagreed. If you would just briefly respond to some of the

claims. You bet. Well, first off, whites of her personality, I haven't heard, I mean, that's absolutely ludicrous. It just so happens among our attorneys. We have a higher percentage of African-American attorneys than the general population of America. So I, and we don't, and we don't hire, we have people Latino, we have different cultural backgrounds. We don't hire based on what group you're part of. We look at people's heart, their skill set, and they join the team. So that's a totally red herring. With regard to Adolf Hitler, the point that I made, and people need to actually read the wording of it, it's very clear.

I was at a Proposition 8 rally and supporting Proposition 8, which was defining marriage between a man and a woman under California. law. That's been the law in all 50 states for a long time. And I wouldn't call our founding fathers hate groups and hate people, or Abraham, Lincoln, et cetera. But anyway, I was there and I said, I did a metaphor. I did an analogy. And I agree. You got to be careful with World War II Hitler analogies. I've learned that. Others have learned that, I think, the hard way. But the point I made was I said, to paraphrase, I said, look, during the time of Adolf Hitler, the church was silent. And because they were silent, bombs not only fell upon Nazi Germany and also upon the testimony of the church for being silent. I says, let the church learn from that and not be silent

about supporting what they know is the right thing and supporting truths. That is what I was saying. Now, they said, well, because you made that analogy, you're saying that Nazis are, are, right, homosexuals are like Nazis. They're like, no, that wasn't my point. My point was that the church needs to learn from history and not be silent when there's something it's clearly, scripture, clearly right and wrong according to their faith. That was my point.

And here's the kicker. After I made that point, they attacked me. I went and clarified, made a really clear, the whole illustration, and they didn't care. They don't want clarification. They want to destroy, period. they're not looking for truth.

You know, also, you know, there was a lesbian couple that once contacted me. And I said, are you the mother of the child? Or do you know, she says, yes, I'm actually the biological mother of the child. And social workers were threatening to come in and attack them and take the family at a false accusation.

And, you know, and I have a different belief in perspective than they do. But I do believe in parental rights for everyone who's a natural parent as long as they're not being abusive. So I spent the time on the phone to talk to them and talk to the mother,

the biological mother of that child, to let her know what her rights were as a parent. Now, if I was a hate person, I don't think I would have done that. Another gentleman, who was a leader in the transgender movement in the United States, you know, he testified,

he was, you know, tact us, and less than two weeks later, I was sitting right next to him on One American News. At break time, I says, you know, is it possible we get together and visit afterwards? I'd love to sit down and talk to you,

understand your path, where you came from. I've been down there. And we met for about three and a half hours. And at the end, he said, Brad, he goes, you know, you're really different than what I thought. I said, you man, I'm not the cold heart, hatefield extreme as big. He goes, no. He goes, yeah, no, you're not that way at all.

I said, I'm really glad to meet you. Me too. We met second time, a third time. Great, great person. We have a different world view, but I love him, and I know he's going through a lot of hurt and a lot of pain. So people who have hate don't go out of their way to spend time with people who are different, much less who attack them, who disagree with them.

And I will tell people out there, I have no problem sitting down with people who disagree with me. I've done it for years. But Southern Poverty Law Center, unfortunately, doesn't want to be one of those people because I think their intentions are very clear. It's not about love. It's not about understanding. It is about furthering hate. And that, unfortunately, is really their bottom line.

And there's one last thing I feel like we need to address the elephant in the room, the big, you know, indictment against the SPLC. The DOJ has claimed that the SPLC was funding some of the very hate groups that they claim they exist to oppose. And of course, this isn't referring to those who I think are falsely branded hate groups, groups like PJI. But this is referring to groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis. And the SPLC allegedly was reimbursing people for cross-burnings, was paying for clanhoods. I mean, it's the kind of thing that you couldn't make up. But they were doing this allegedly to prop up hate as something to run to fundraise against by saying that they're fighting this. And so they're facing fraud accusations about the...

that. How do you think these claims at all relate to the SPLC's attacks on PJI and your offer to, you know, have a debate with the SPLC? Yeah. These attacks are on the same vein as their attacks of PGI and that their goal in the end is money and they're willing to use hate and division any way they can to in order to give them opportunities to raise money to make money. The fact that they had the audacity to not just spread false information about wonderful charity organizations

and individuals like Franklin Graham and others doing great work, the fact that not only did they do that, but the fact that they're willing to actually take money out of their own coffers to invest and promote those the most extremist organizations out that are the most least threatening, by the way,

relatively speaking, just to create this image that they can then raise money from, it's just so unethical. It's shameful. It's disgraceful. You know, I'm not surprised that the head of their organization stepped down after I sent the first letter, challenging for a public debate, public discussion.

You know, they've got him. I'm just hoping that the next president will not only recognize the wrong that they've done to so many wonderful Christian ministries and ministers and organizations doing great work to help people, but also I hope he steers the organization in the right direction

to not do the things anymore like wire fraud as alleged or funding organizations that they are supposedly fighting. That's fraud. That's a false representation. It's taking people's money. It's stealing, in my opinion.

So let's just hope that they learn their lesson. Our door is wide open. I'm ready to talk, ready to sit down, and we'll see if it happens. But Christianity is not just a term. It's not just a brand. It's not just a brand. It's something that you live. It's something that you believe. It's something that controls your life.

I'm waiting to see if the new president fits in that category. Well, thank you so much, Brad, for joining me. And best of luck with this invitation. I really hope that the SPLC at least gives you the dignity of a response if they don't actually agree to have this debate. Yeah. Thank you. We'll speak. Thank you for the opportunity.