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Rapper Mysonne Linen, who previously served seven years in state prison for armed robbery, repeatedly mispronounced Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s last name during a Friday appearance on The Breakfast Club.
Mamdani recently named Linen to his transition team’s criminal legal system committee—though even that rollout appeared sloppy, with Linen’s name misspelled on the official roster as “Mysoone.”
During the interview, Mysonne Linen cycled through several pronunciations of Mamdani’s last name, none of which appeared to be correct, underscoring the casual unseriousness surrounding the mayor-elect’s transition operation, according to The Daily Caller.
“I really just want to focus on just doing this work. Shout out to Mayor Mandami and his team. My team, Until Freedom, we’ve been doing this work … I’m not getting no check for this,” Linen said. “This is a volunteer because I really believe in what’s supposed to be going on in our communities. We’re going to start forums where we talk about civic engagement with formerly incarcerated, we talk about how hard it is for them to be employed, the collateral damages and causes that happen.”
“We want to talk about those things, and then we want to talk about what’s the next step forward. Women that’s being incarcerated — We’re going to start these convenings and we’re going to have them all at the table,” he continued.
“Like, that is one of the biggest voting blocks in the world that nobody has really tapped into. Formerly incarcerated people — a lot of them don’t even realize they can vote, how strong they are. It’s millions of people who are formerly incarcerated that have really just lost belief in the system,” he added.
Linen then pronounced Mamdani as “Mandami” and “Mandani” before describing how he would not be blindly loyal to the incoming mayor.
“[W]e’re gonna push the agenda. People think, ‘Oh, you with the government.’ Nah. If they do something wrong, I’ma be outside protesting Mandami, too,” he said. “‘Cause that’s what we do.”
Linen, 49, was convicted in 1999 for two Bronx taxi cab robberies and served seven years in state prison before rebranding himself as a criminal justice activist focused on gun violence prevention. During the interview, he claimed he was “wrongfully convicted,” a familiar refrain in activist circles.
WATCH:
Mamdani’s crime agenda centers on creating a $1.1 billion “Department of Community Safety,” which would divert nonviolent and mental health calls away from police and into civilian-led teams, while keeping the headcount of the New York City Police Department roughly unchanged.
Mamdani has previously called for defunding the NYPD, at one point branding the department “racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety.”
He later softened that rhetoric on the campaign trail, though critics note the underlying policy vision remains largely the same.
Mamdani ignored a written request from 19 city charter school leaders seeking a meeting to discuss collaboration on educating disadvantaged students.
In a Dec. 1 invitation, the charter school operators told Mamdani they were eager to work with him and argued they could support his affordability agenda—an offer the democratic socialist chose to brush aside rather than engage, the New York Post reported.
“Equity and affordability are inseparable,” the leaders wrote in the letter, according to The Post. The letter offered Dec. 12 as a possible date for a meet-and-greet at Ember Charter School for Mindful Education.
“When a family can count on an excellent public school near home, life gets less expensive: fewer hours on buses, fewer tutoring bills, fewer impossible choices between rent and opportunity,” the letter added, per The Post. “In short, when equity rises, fewer people, especially black and brown families, feel compelled to leave our great city.”
However, the New York City mayor-elect never even responded, the outlet said.
“So far there’s been radio silence,” Eva Moskowitz, founder and head of the city’s largest charter school network, the 59-school Success Academy and a co-signer of the letter, told The Post.
However, Moskowitz said she remained “optimistic” that she and other charter school operators can build a positive relationship with the Mamdani administration.
