Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

Ex-Convict Rapper Who Zohran Mamdani Tapped Can’t Seem To Pronounce Mayor-Elect’s Last Name

Screenshot/YouTube/Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

Rapper Mysonne Linen, who served seven years in state prison for armed robbery, repeatedly mispronounced New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s last name during a Friday interview on “The Breakfast Club.”

Mamdani tapped Linen to his transition team’s criminal legal system committee, misspelling his name on his committee roster as “Mysoone.” Linen appeared to use several different pronunciations of Mamdani’s last name during his appearance on the show, none of which seemed accurate.

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“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.”

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 of two Bronx taxi stickups and subsequently reinvented himself as an activist, spending years in criminal justice advocacy and gun violence prevention. He asserted during the interview that he was “wrongfully convicted.”

Mamdani’s crime agenda focuses on establishing a $1.1 billion “Department of Community Safety” to shift non-violent and mental-health calls away from police and into civilian teams, while keeping the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) headcount roughly flat.

The mayor-elect previously advocated defunding the NYPD, describing the department as “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” However, he walked back his comments during his campaign.