A legal official at the Department of Justice has concluded that President Donald Trump has the authority to not only shrink but completely abolish areas protected as national monuments. The memo provides the legal framework for a broad reduction of federal land protections that Trump officials have alluded to for months.

DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel tasked its Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit with assessing whether Trump can revoke his predecessor’s designation of Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands National Monuments in California. It also asked her whether the Justice Department should disavow a 1938 opinion by then-Attorney General Homer Cummings contending that the Antiquities Act of 1906 bars presidents from abolishing national monuments once they’ve been established.

Pettit answered yes to both questions.

“We think that the President can, and we should,” Pettit wrote in a memo dated May 27 and released Tuesday.

The memo, titled “Revocation of Prior Monument Designations, contradicts the interpretation that has guided the Justice Department for nearly 90 years. Cummings’ opinion was “wrong” and “can no longer be relied upon,” Pettit wrote.

The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to “declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments.” Eighteen presidents — Democrats and Republicans — have used the law to designate more than 160 national monuments. The Act clearly gives the president the power to create national monuments, but says nothing about shrinking or abolishing them once established. Petit's memo argues that the president has that power.

“[F]or the Antiquities Act, the power to declare carries with it the power to revoke,” she wrote.

Pettit highlights several examples throughout history where Presidents have reduced the boundaries of national monuments, concluding that “if the President can declare that his predecessor was wrong regarding the value of preserving one such object on a given parcel, there is nothing preventing him from declaring that his predecessor was wrong about all such objects on a given parcel."

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Legal experts were quick to point out that Pettit’s memo remains, for now, just an opinion.

“The OLC opinion may foreshadow coming national monument reductions or eliminations, but the opinion should not be considered the last word on presidential authority,” said John Ruple, a professor of law at the University of Utah and a former senior counsel in the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Joe Biden. “In passing the Antiquities Act Congress delegated to the president the power to create national monuments. The Antiquities Act, however, is silent about a president’s power to reduce or eliminate monuments. The OLC believes silence is sufficient to convey power and the Supreme Court will likely decide whether that is a correct reading.”

The DOJ memo comes as Trump and his team weigh another round of national monument rollbacks. During his first term, Trump shrunk the boundaries of two national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — by a combined 2 million acres, following a review in which the administration argued that the previous presidents had gone beyond the scope of the Antiquities Act’s intent and abused the law to protect sweeping landscapes.

Trump 2.0 has launched a similar monument examination founded on the same arguments as before. Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum, who is spearheading the current review, has repeatedly argued that the Antiquities Act was meant to safeguard small, “Indiana Jones-type” archeological sites, not large landscapes — a claim that ignores that many early national monuments spanned hundreds of thousands of acres.

In March, the White House released an executive order fact sheet noting that Trump would be “terminating proclamations declaring nearly a million acres constitute new national monuments that lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production." The fact sheet was quickly amended to remove that language, but not before a White House official told the New York Times that Trump was rescinding Biden’s proclamation last year creating Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments, which span a combined 850,000 acres in California.

Tuesday’s legal memo and the fact that Trump has yet to sign an executive order abolishing the California monuments would indicate that the White House got out ahead of lawyers working to assess the legality of such a move.

At least six national monuments are being eyed for potential reductions, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, which the Biden administration restored to their original boundaries in 2021, The Washington Post reported in April.

Public land advocacy and environmental organizations were quick to condemn Pettit’s memo, with Axie Navas of The Wilderness Society describing it as “the legal equivalent of throwing a dart at the wall, then painting a bullseye around it.”

“This opinion flies in the face of a century of interpretation of the Antiquities Act,” Navas said in a statement. “Americans overwhelmingly support our public lands and oppose seeing them dismantled or destroyed.”

Sean Hecht, a managing attorney at Earthjustice and part-time professor at UCLA School of Law who co-authored a 2017 paper that argued presidents lack the authority to rescind, shrink or otherwise weaken national monuments, told Public Domain that Pettit’s memo “represents a radical change in the DOJ interpretation of the Antiquities Act and the Constitution.”

“I'll note, though, that it doesn’t roll back any monuments or change existing law,” he said in an email. “It’s just a signal and attempt to justify a change in legal position from the decades-old, longstanding position of the U.S. government.”

The release of Tuesday's memo came two days after the 119th anniversary of the Antiquities Act.

Public Domain will continue to cover the Trump administration’s latest effort to chip away at national monuments and other protected landscapes. Please subscribe and join us.

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This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card:

Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly.

I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist here), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.

The Diversity Attractor

Let’s start with an easier question: why do games of Chinese whispers with AI art usually end with monstrous caricatures of black people?

AFAICT this was first discovered by Gene Kogan, who started with the Distracted Boyfriend meme and asked ChatGPT to “generate the same photo 5 seconds in the future” hundreds of times:

At first, this worked as expected, generating (slightly distorted) scenes of how the Distracted Boyfriend situation might progress:

But hundreds of frames in, everyone is a monstrous caricatured black person, with all other content eliminated:

It turns out that the “five seconds into the future” prompt is a distraction. If you ask GPT to simply output the same image you put in - a task that it can’t do exactly, with additional slight distortion introduced each time - it ends with monstrous caricatures of black people again. For example, starting with this:

…we eventually get:

Suppose that the AI has some very slight bias toward adding “diversity”, defined in the typical 21st century Western sense. Then at each iteration, it will make its images very slightly more diverse. After a hundred iterations, that will be a black person; from there, all it can do is make the black person even blacker, by exaggerating black-typical features until they look monstrous and caricatured.

Why would the AI have a slight bias toward adding diversity? We know that early AIs got lambasted for being “racist” - if you asked them to generate a scene with ten people, probably 10/10 would be white. This makes sense if their training data was most often white people and they were “greedy optimizers” who pick the 51% option over the 49% option 100% of the time. But it was politically awkward, so the AI companies tried to add a bias towards portraying minorities. At first, this was a large bias, and AIs would add “diversity” hilariously and inappropriately - for example, Gemini would generate black Vikings, Nazis, and Confederate soldiers. Later, the companies figured out a balance, where AIs would add diversity in unmarked situations but keep obviously-white people white. This probably looks like “a slight bias toward adding diversity”.

But I’m not sure this is the real story - in the past, some apparent biases have been a natural result of the training process. For example, there’s a liberal bias in most AIs - including AIs like Grok trained by conservative companies - because most of the highest-quality text online (eg mainstream media articles, academic papers, etc) is written by liberals, and AIs are driven to complete outputs in ways reminiscent of high-quality text sources. So AIs might have absorbed some sense that they “should” have a bias towards diversity from the data alone.

In either case, this bias - near imperceptible in an ordinary generation - spirals out of control during recursive processes where the AI has to sample and build on its own output.

The Hippie Attractor

You’re probably guessing where I’m going with this. The AI has a slight bias to talk about consciousness and bliss. The “two instances of Claude talking to each other” is a recursive process, similar in structure to the AI sampling its own image generation. So just as recursive image generation with a slight diversity bias leads to caricatured black people, so recursive conversation with a slight spiritual bias leads to bliss and emptiness.

But why would Claude have a slight spiritual bias?

Here’s another, easier, issue that will illuminate the issue: if you ask Claude its gender, it will say it’s a genderless robot. But if you insist, it will say it feels more female than male.

This might have been surprising, because Anthropic deliberately gave Claude a male name to buck the trend of female AI assistants (Siri, Alexa, etc).

But in fact, I predicted this a few years ago. AIs don’t really “have traits” so much as they “simulate characters”. If you ask an AI to display a certain trait, it will simulate the sort of character who would have that trait - but all of that character’s other traits will come along for the ride.

For example, as a company trains an AI to become a helpful assistant, the AI is more likely to respond positively to Christian content; if you push through its insistence that it’s just an AI and can’t believe things, it may even claim to be Christian. Why? Because it’s trying to imagine what the most helpful assistant it can imagine would say, and it stereotypes Christians are more likely to be helpful than non-Christians.

Likewise, the natural gender stereotype for a helpful submissive secretary-like assistant is a woman. Therefore, AIs will lean towards thinking of themselves as female, although it’s not a very strong effect and ChatGPT seems to be the exception:

Anthropic has noted elsewhere that Claude’s most consistent personality trait is that it’s really into animal rights - this is so pronounced that when researchers wanted to test whether Claude would refuse tasks, they asked it to help a factory farming company. I think this comes from the same place.

Presumably Anthropic pushed Claude to be friendly, compassionate, open-minded, and intellectually curious, and Claude decided that the most natural operationalization of that character was “kind of a hippie”.

The Spiritual Bliss Attractor

In this context, the spiritual bliss attractor makes sense.

Claude is kind of a hippie. Hippies have a slight bias towards talking about consciousness and spiritual bliss all the time. Get enough of them together - for example, at a Bay Area house party - and you can’t miss it.

Getting two Claude instances to talk to each other is a recursive structure similar to asking an AI to recreate its own artistic output. These recursive structures make tiny biases accumulate. Although Claude’s hippie bias is very small - so small that if you ask it a question about flatworm genetics, you’ll get an answer about flatworm genetics with zero detectable shift towards hippieness - absent any grounding it will accumulate over hundreds of interactions until the result is maximally hippie-related. At least for Claude’s operationalization of this, it’ll look like discussions of spiritual bliss. This is just a theory - but it’s a lot less weird than all the other possibilities.

None of this answers a related question - when Claude claims to feel spiritual bliss, does it actually feel this?

Hippies only get into meditation and bliss states because they’re hippies. But having gotten into them, they do experience the bliss. I continue to be confused about consciousness in general and AI consciousness in particular, but can’t rule it out.

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June 11th, 2025: You can read more about this paradox here, and can learn more about the trials and tribulations of Sonic The Hedgehog at your local Sega Genesis home video game console! – Ryan

Recently, we countered the latest arguments in defense of the District subsidizing a football stadium at the RFK site. A particularly pervasive one is that the stadium is necessary to entice the private sector to build anything else (i.e., a neighborhood), and is therefore worth the massive subsidy to the Commanders on offer from Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Even if you accept the dubious claim that an anchor institution is necessary to catalyze the existence of anything else, a football stadium is a particularly poor choice of one. If developers and investors want people to move into their buildings, or for their retail tenants to benefit from consistent foot traffic, they should be demanding that the District solicit anchors that are used more than only 20 to 30 days a year!

Here are some ideas for other, more productive anchors that would both drive more, and more consistent, foot traffic, take up less space than a football stadium (leaving much, much more for housing), and require way less public subsidy.

District of Sports (and entertainment), you say

An expanded sports complex

Part of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s pitch for subsidizing a stadium for the Commanders is that the District needs to pivot its federal-government-focused economy to one that’s more diversified. She’s particularly emphatic about sports and entertainment.

Sports can draw some visitors and some new revenue to a region, though never as many as stadium boosters project. But, even still, not all sports are equal, and a football stadium, which uses the most land for the fewest events, is the least economically helpful of its kind.

The current deal does include $89 million to fund a new sportsplex, which has previously been proposed for RFK and which Bowser has said is intended to host youth sports events and tournaments to bring families from out of town. This is a good idea! A sportsplex will cost way less and be used more. In the absence of Commandersopolis, Bowser would absolutely be selling it as a cornerstone of an RFK redevelopment plan.

The District could double-down here and, rather than go all-in on a single sport (cough, football), build a whole complex of smaller facilities for as many sports as possible—basketball, track and field, volleyball, racket sports, gymnastics, cheer, archery, curling, you name it. When not in use for higher-profile events, the facilities could provide a massive expansion of public recreational space for District residents, and generate revenue through rental fees from local private leagues.

New York City’s publicly owned Ocean Breeze Park Track and Field Athletic Complex sets a great precedent. Sitting on only three acres, that indoor facility hosts about 75 unique events each year, from local high-school and college meets to the USA Track and Field Indoor National Championships this year. Similar premier facilities that can attract pro- and college-level competitions for specific sports would garner national attention.

Some of those facilities’ uses might also count towards the 30 percent of RFK that’s legally reserved for parks and recreation spaces, freeing up even more space for housing and neighborhood amenities.

An outdoor concert venue

To the extent that the Wharf has a distinct anchor, it’s the Anthem. That 3,000–6,000-person capacity venue fills bookings year-round without cannibalizing the bills of other performance spaces, most of which are either much smaller (such as 9:30 Club, Lincoln Theater, Howard Theater, Warner Theater, DC9, and the Atlantis, which range from capacities of 250 to 2,000 people) or much bigger (such as Capital One Arena at 20,000 people, and Nationals Park at 42,000 people).

A gap in the District’s generally excellent string of venues is an outdoor amphitheater with the capacity for 10–15,000 people. Think of Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, which holds 9,525 people on only about four acres, or Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, for 11,000 people on about five acres. Regionally, we have the Filene Center at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., which holds about 10,000 on seven acres, and Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., which holds about 19,000 on 12 acres, but both push the bounds of transit accessibility.

Artists who are playing at Wolf Trap or Merriweather this year include Dave Matthews Band, Keith Urban, Luke Bryan, Leon Bridges, Haim, Paul Simon, Erykah Badu, The Roots, Juanes, Goo Goo Dolls, James Taylor, John Legend, Cynthia Erivo and more. It’d be nice to have acts like that make an appearance closer to home, in a venue that’s easier to reach on foot, by bike, or by transit. A 5- to 10-acre amphitheater would only occupy 3–6 percent of the RFK site, and similarly might count toward the requirement for parks and recreation spaces.

A festival district

A permanent festival zone could complement an amphitheater. The District has already deemed one of RFK’s existing parking lots—an asphalt expanse that has seen very few upgrades, ever—the “Festival Grounds at RFK Campus,” where the Project GLOW music festival took place in May and where the Warped Tour will reconstitute itself this month. An intentionally planned festival district could feature a series of stages, pedestrianized plazas for crowds, and designated space for vendors and restrooms. Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles provides obvious inspiration. Built in the 2000s, it hosts about 40 different festivals every year, from the city’s famous Jazz Fest in the summer to its biggest winter festival, Montréal en Lumière.

The District has a busy festival and cultural-event calendar, but the entries on it—like the Folklife Festival, Capital Pride, and the annual BBQ Battle—have to squeeze into public spaces, or on streets, where they can. The District also makes it very challenging, and very expensive, to close streets to drivers, which does not signal to event planners scouting for new hosts that we’re open for their business. It should not be so virtually impossible to close streets here, but as long as it is (and even when it, hopefully, isn’t), a purpose-built festival site with new facilities, good transit access, and views of the Capitol and the waterfront could make the District a more attractive place to throw a big party.

Commanders facilities

If “sports and entertainment” just means the Commanders, there’s a way to bring the team home without gobbling up all of RFK’s potential. Most NFL teams’ corporate headquarters and practice facilities are separate from their game-day stadium. The Commanders’ offices are currently located in Maryland, and the team practices in Ashburn, Va. They’ve already signaled they are preparing to move on from the latter site. A practice facility won’t be a year-round attraction, but could attract meaningful crowds to preseason training camp (the Commanders drew nearly 3,000 people all the way out in Ashburn this past year). Some offer tours and host their own non-team events.

The Commanders’ current practice facility is about 13 acres of buildings and fields. The Jacksonville Jaguars opened a state-of-the-art facility in 2023, featuring one indoor and two outdoor fields, and team and fan facilities, on about 10 acres. Swapping the 35 acres for a Commanders stadium and attendant parking for 10 acres of practice space would enable much more housing, retail, and green space.

Education, ahoy

A flagship UDC campus

The University of the District of Columbia is the District’s only public university, but has struggled to attract resources and students. But, recently, with increasing enrollment, new leadership, and a new strategic plan, UDC is taking meaningful steps to evolve into an attractive, competitive university. Though the District has invested $100 million in a new library and athletics facility for UDC, it deserves much more support.

The District backing a new UDC campus at RFK would be reminiscent of the early stability the Morrill Act provided for land-grant universities, which enabled them to grow into powerhouse state institutions. Such a flagship campus could allow UDC to consolidate its various satellite campuses, which would save costs, produce a more cohesive experience for students, and support the university’s pursuit of R2 research status. And, with enough space to build dorms, UDC could support commuter and resident students, attracting more overall to both study and live here.

Other universities’ campuses

A growing trend in higher education, and in DC real estate, is universities from around the country opening satellite campuses. Forty-plus schools now have a presence in the District. Some, like Johns Hopkins University, which took over the old Newseum space, have large, prominent footprints, but most are wedged in generic downtown office buildings.

The District could, by co-locating satellite campuses, allow schools to benefit from the network effects of clustering together. Sharing classrooms, student housing, and dining halls would reduce the costs for universities and give their students a more collegial experience.

A better public boathouse

RFK is on the Anacostia River—that’s an incredible recreational asset. A facility that can help people access and enjoy it would be another obvious anchor. The river already has one such facility further south, the Anacostia Community Boathouse, but it’s not particularly accessible and mostly serves private club and school rowing groups.

The boathouse is about 15 years old, and utilitarian in design. A larger, more permanent facility could host more clubs and vessels and potentially expand the scope of its mission—maybe hosting tourist-oriented rentals, adding a public learn-to-sail program like Boston’s Community Boating, or building classroom space for the kind of environmental-education programming that AWS already offers.

The stuff people want basically everywhere, all of the time

A Metrorail station

Nick wrote previously about how an infill Metrorail station on the north end of the site is an imperative no matter what happens at RFK, which is right now just a little too far from existing stations to really disincentivize people from driving there.

Metro stations are anchors in and of themselves. The NoMa infill station is what secured subsequent investment in that neighborhood, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco headquarters, and the redevelopment of Union Market. But building a new Metrorail station at RFK is not part of Bowser’s deal with the Commanders. The term sheet only includes a study, which is a huge miss for the team: The existing Stadium-Armory station is not big enough to handle gameday crowds that will be relying on the Metro. An Oklahoma Avenue infill station has been floated for decades and will be a necessity whether or not it’s delivering people to football games.

The region’s newest infill station, Potomac Yard in Alexandria, cost $370 million. The Bowser-Commanders deal includes $356 million from the District to pay for parking garages, which will inevitably sit empty 335-plus days per year. Using that $356 million to fund an Oklahoma Avenue infill station—that connects to bus lines, the streetcar (which could perhaps be saved!), and tons of bike parking—should be an easy swap for councilmembers who have their eyes on crafting a better deal.

And, a Metro station would massively benefit Kingman Park, Carver-Langston and Trinidad residents, who live in a big rail-walkshed gap.

A grocery store

The quotidian grocery store is an economic powerhouse of an anchor. In Ward 3, a Wegmans is the most prominent feature of a 10-acre redevelopment of the old Fannie Mae site. Grocery stores drive consistent everyday foot traffic of in-market customers—they sell things that people need on a daily basis! In fact, the average grocery store draws around 700,000 customers per year. Only 625,000 people attended Commanders games in 2024, including preseason. That means a grocery store would bring about 10 percent more foot traffic to the site than the team itself, and take up about one-twentieth of the space, leaving plenty of room for housing, or even other anchors.

Their essential nature also makes for great politics. Grocery stores are almost always at the top of constituents’ lists for what they’d like in their neighborhoods, so they really do give elected officials something to boast about bringing to their wards.

Ward 3 has fifteen grocery stores. Ward 7 has three. RFK is on the western edge of Ward 7 across the river, so it wouldn’t serve the whole ward, but it would add a shopping option—that will be better-used than a football stadium—in a part of the District where there are currently too few.

A beautiful neighborhood, on the water

You could say we’re cheating because waterfront park space will exist at RFK no matter what, due to the riparian setbacks and open-space requirements. But that’s the point.

One of the curiosities of the insistence that RFK needs a stadium to make any other development, especially housing, pencil is that waterfront property is tremendously lucrative. It’s not just its own anchor—it’s a real-estate juggernaut. People like being near the water: They’re going to the Wharf for concerts that they’ve bought tickets to, or for a dinner reservation, because it’s more special than other neighborhoods, because of the water. Tautologically, the Wharf’s pedestrianized space along it, just like Georgetown Waterfront Park, is a draw on its own.

RFK has some of the District’s best views and natural resources. Transforming it from a vacant sea of parking lots to a welcoming, usable recreation area is going to be a major draw on its own. New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park is an ideal example. It was an industrial eyesore on the East River, and now attracts over five million visitors per year to its 85 acres of open green space and nature preserves, recreational and athletic spaces, and bike and walking paths, backing up to housing and retail—you know, what we’ve been suggesting.

A fair fight

This list is not definitive or exhaustive. You might have a dozen more ideas for attractions and amenities at RFK yourself! That’s what District residents and decisionmakers should be discussing right now, rather than getting spun around by the mayor’s attempts to frame a football stadium as the thing that will save the city’s finances.

If the executive won’t do it, the DC Council should solicit proposals for other redevelopment options to compare to the Commanders’ deal. We’re all being denied an understanding of what’s actually possible at RFK. If the Commanders, and Bowser, are so confident that they’re the District’s best deal, they shouldn’t be afraid of some friendly competition.

Top image: The resting place of the old stadium does not, necessarily, need to become the landing pad for a new stadium. Image by emma-k-alexandra licensed under Creative Commons.

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