Tony Dungy, J.K. Rowling and the ‘great uncanceling’

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A couple of months ago, I noticed something strange: Tony Dungy was regularly posting on X about the Bible and his opposition to abortion — and no one was calling for his cancellation.
Compare this to January of 2023, when the former NFL coach was under fire for writing about going to the March for Life, and for a tweet about gender identification, for which he later apologized. Some people were even saying he should be fired as a sports commentator.
What changed?
It certainly wasn’t Dungy, a devout Christian who has never shied away from bringing his faith into his professional space.
As I wrote in 2023, Dungy is one of the most altruistic and genuinely likable people in American culture; it was shocking that anyone could call for him to be fired or “unplatformed” for any reason, let alone these. But after years of cancel culture gathering steam, there was a sense that if you stirred the pot of controversy enough, you could brand anyone a “hater” despite ample evidence to the contrary, and shut down the speech that you personally disliked. And a year and a half ago, that looked to be true, even though people on both sides of the political aisle bemoaned this state of affairs.
Now, however, there’s a sense that cancel culture might finally — finally — be on the way out. And while there are multiple reasons for this, Tony Dungy’s refusal to be canceled is one of them. Over the past two years, he has provided a master class in how to be cancel-proof.
First, by all accounts, he appears to be a person of extraordinarily good character and temperament. As sportscaster Danny Kanell wrote on X, “Coach Dungy is one of the most genuine, humble, and morally upright people I’ve ever met. There is not an ounce of hate in him.” So when people like Keith Olbermann tried to paint Dungy as a hater who hurt NBC’s brand, the criticism had no purchase whatsoever. It couldn’t stick.
Second, instead of blustering and denying every single criticism lodged against him, Dungy has shown he is willing to consider other points of view and to course-correct when he believes it is called for.
Evan Nierman, the CEO of the crisis communications firm Red Banyan and author of “The Cancel Culture Curse,” told me that Dungy “did not grovel over possessing a view that offends others” but instead apologized for the tenor of his comments, saying, “As a Christian, I should speak in love and in ways that are caring and helpful.”
Further, Nierman noted, those who went after Tony Dungy “would have a hard time making the case that they are morally superior to a man who has been a devoted husband of 40 years, a model father to 11 kids, and has opened up his home to more than 100 foster children.”
As the end of the year approaches, I’m usually looking for people to feature in a story titled “The year in cancel culture.” But this year, I am cautiously optimistic that cancel culture, as we’ve known it for the past decade, appears to be winding down.
This is not to say that there aren’t still cries for people, products and programs to be shut down (as executives at Jaguar, now under fire for an edgy ad, can attest).
But with people like Dungy standing strong in their beliefs, the purveyors of cancel culture look much like the wolf trying to blow down the brick house of the third little pig in the classic fable (which, by the way, has a much more disturbing ending than the version I heard as a child). Even HBO has recently come out in support of J.K. Rowling, a perennial target of cancel culture, saying she “has a right to express her personal views.”
In fact, there are people on X talking about a “Great Uncanceling” in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, as people who were formerly afraid to express support for Trump are being more open. The danger for Republicans now is that they become the party of cancellation. Far better for the country that we move to a place where cancel culture is considered a shameful part of our past, like tangerine-colored shag carpet, which, despite rumors of its resurgence, should remain buried in landfills.
Columbia Journalism Review reports that in the wake of Trump’s election and Elon Musk’s growing political influence, some journalists have been abandoning X for Bluesky, a platform that seems to be growing out of equal parts of nostalgia for ye olde Twitter and hatred of Musk.
Of course, it wasn’t so long ago when conservatives were threatening to leave Twitter for Parler, and we all know how that turned out. But regardless of the rush to embrace what’s perceived as the Next Big Thing, it seems unwise, to say the least, for journalists to abandon what has become the conservative public square at the very time in which they are trying to understand why Trump won again and how they can, as Jeff Bezos urged last month, recover public trust.
Writing for CJR, Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen noted that many journalists had vowed to leave after Musk bought Twitter, and either didn’t follow through, or, like The New York Times’s Ezra Kline, left and returned. And NPR notes that for all the hype about Bluesky in recent weeks, it remains a “relatively small community,” with reports of more than 22 million users, compared to X’s count of 250 million daily users.
For the record, the Next Big Thing isn’t even new. Bluesky was launched in 2019 by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey — who reportedly is no longer using the app. I don’t know, but that doesn’t seem like a positive sign. And author Anne Lamott, no fan of Musk or Trump, recently wrote on X: “We of the noble if anxious Twitter Loser Colony can see with our own eyes that everyone is leaving for Blue Sky. Months ago, everyone left for Threads, so I set up camp there. Now Threads is bad? We of the usually-confused TLC are going to have to get back to you on all this.”
“The home is where most of our heroism must occur. There is a special kind of annoyance that happens in the home — a more potent offense and a more stinging rebuke than found anywhere else in the world,” Allyson Flake Matsoso on the challenges of families — and why we need them, chaos and all.
And just for fun, here are the Thanksgiving columns from George Will and Maureen Dowd circa 2016 — when Trump had just won the presidency for the first time. Much of what they wrote then is still shockingly applicable today: Just substitute Kamala Harris for every mention of Hillary Clinton.
Dowd, writing for The New York Times: “Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked, and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion.”
Will, for The Washington Post: “At this shank end of a shabby year, Americans still can be thankful: They do not have the problem of nothing to grumble about. As we steel ourselves for Thanksgiving’s obligatory routs and revels — does anyone really like turkey? or Uncle Ralph, who keeps turning up, like a bad penny? — Americans are cudgeling their brains for reasons to feel gratitude. So, herewith a call for everyone to temper gloom with lucidity. Things could be worse. And they often have been while Americans nevertheless were giving thanks.”
Thank you to everyone who reached out in the past week, including Mark, who described himself as a “middle-of-the-road conservative” who is open to listening to alternative ways of thinking. “Just wish more folks from a more liberal-progressive leaning would feel the same,” he said.
Agreed, but I have to admit that I have been surprised by a number of people, both in my personal acquaintance and online, who are vehemently anti-Trump, but effectively shrugged at the election results, saying their kind was outnumbered and they’re willing to see what Trump does in a second term. To Mark’s point, they’re just getting drowned out by more hysterical voices encouraging Democrats to spurn family members who didn’t vote like they did.
Meanwhile, speaking for all of us is Luci Lu, in a photo that Right to the Point reader Michael captioned, “Ah, the election is finally over.”
Actually, I’m thinking she’s thinking: “Whatever will I watch when Elon Musk buys MSNBC?”
Send your pet photos, your newsletter feedback and ideas, and your ideal Christmas music playlist to me at [email protected]. Happy Thanksgiving, and thank you for reading.