Update: It now appears that the alleged legal threat by Dr. Seuss Enterprises was a forgery. A tweet by Seth Dillon claiming receipt of the legal notice is “no longer available.” A Daily Wire post which reported the supposed threat now has the following added at the top:

Seuss Enterprises told The Daily Wire that the legal threat is fake and that Seuss Enterprises never demanded the retraction.

“The purported legal notice is a fake. It did not come from Dr. Seuss Enterprises or anyone associated with the organization,” Seuss Enterprises told The Daily Wire.

This morning (April 20), I can’t find anything on Dillon’s Twitter feed either reaffirming or retracting the statement that they received a notice from the Seuss organization. We can all make mistakes (as the original version of this post shows), but we need to correct them, especially when they make someone look bad.

Sorry about conveying erroneous information. Now I have to go back to all the places where I posted links to this article and post updates.

Original post follows…

In March, I wrote that Dr. Seuss Enterprises faced a difficult situation. It now seems I was wrong. They’re just nuts. They discovered a satirical Babylon Bee article and are now threatening to sue.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has the right to stop publishing any titles it owns. What it doesn’t have is the right to stop others from commenting on its decisions. I’m not a lawyer, so I shouldn’t make a definitive statement on this case, but I’m pretty confident that the legal precedents on satire give the Seuss gang no grounds for silencing the Babylon Bee.

I doubt that Theodore Geisel would have done the same. Mad Magazine ran a number of Seuss parodies. “The Cats Are All Bats” was presented as a Dr. Seuss book for adults, using his illustration and rhyming styles. It dealt with issues such as infidelity, pollution, and crime. I never heard that he objected.

Attempts like this at legal intimidation happen now and then. Probably in a lot of cases they have the desired effect, scaring the satirist into silence. In other cases, they create a lot of bad publicity for the people making the threats. This looks like a case of the latter. Dr. Seuss Enterprises has just antagonized a bunch of its erstwhile allies.