Ben Nadeff-Haffrey
speaker
1,009 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Ben Nadeff-Haffrey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So towards the end of this process, you're like, this might actually not happen.
The vote was a referendum.
It was Staten Island saying, we want to leave.
But the New York state government was going to have the final say.
And the next year, when the referendum came before the state assembly, the speaker just killed it.
It was dead in the water.
Someone else had to have known where all this was going to, Guy Molinari.
This was supposed to be the biggest night in his borough's history, and yet he was nowhere to be found on the island.
Instead, he was in Manhattan with his good friend, Rudolph Giuliani, who was at that moment being elected mayor of New York City.
When I started this series, I told you that this story would amount to a big argument about where our country finds itself today.
There's an old way of thinking about time that I love, from the Middle Ages.
The idea is that time doesn't just go horizontally, where today is closest to tomorrow, but also vertically.
That certain days are closer to all their earlier incarnations.
Christmas this year is nearer to Christmas last year than it is to December 26th.
It's like a wormhole.
And what I'm proposing is that when voters went to the polls on November 2nd, 1993, to elect a mayor and decide whether or not to break New York City up and send Staten Island off on its own, that day was very close to Election Day 2016.
That the era we are living in now has everything to do with that moment then.
That as a historian told me when I began all this, America really does happen first in New York City.
And the America happening now is something you could see first in the Staten Island secession movement.
And even more critically, in the man that movement gave us.
Showing 21–40 of 1,009 · page 2 of 51
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