Ep. 12: Conservative mayor candidate Ellen Zhou wants to end 50-year Democrat rule in San Francisco

On today's Chinatown 2.0, I speak with Ellen Lee Zhou, or 李爱晨, a two-time candidate for San Francisco mayor, in 2018 and 2019.

She ran as a conservative in a city where the mayor had been a Democrat for the last half a century. On top of her “non-mainstream” political ideologies, she had zero experience holding public office and raised very little money compared to her competition.

Despite all this, she won 4% of the votes in 2018, and 13% of the votes in 2019. And in 2019, she was second place in the race.

Ellen is a staunch supporter for Donald Trump, as will be quite obvious to those of you watching the video interview.

We discussed her experience running for the mayor of San Francisco. We also talked about issues in San Francisco such as homelessness, drugs, crimes, high property prices, deteriorating standards in public education, government corruption, voter fraud, and more. For most of these items, we also talked about solutions put forward by Ellen.

We also briefly touched upon Ellen’s day job as a behavioral health clinician, where she works with doctors and nurses to treat the mentally ill.

Lastly, Ellen talked about her circumstances when she first immigrated to the US as a teenager some thirty years ago.

As usual, don’t forget to like, subscribe and ring the bell on our Youtube channel. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Ellen’s 2019 campaign website: https://ellenformayor2019.com/
Ellen on Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Ellen_Lee_Zhou

0:00 Teaser

0:21 Host monologue

3:33 Neighborhood coalition nominated her mayoral candidacy after acknowledging her outspokenness to fight opening of cannabis shops in Chinese areas

7:19 Her family dismissed her 2018 campaign given her lack of resources and experience

11:21 Supporters praised her courage to run and opponents mocked her efforts

12:23 Harassment by politicians and animosity from anti-Trump colleagues during her campaigns

14:50 Homelessness problem: drugs / out-of-city homeless people came for city's generous welfare / ineffective government spending to tackle homelessness

19:10 Walking through how a homeless person gets shelter and benefits from SF

20:39 Ellen's plan to tackle homelessness

24:20 Breakdown of different types of homeless people that ought to receive different kinds of help

29:21 Plan to run for mayor again if a special election takes place in 2021

30:14 Eight San Francisco city officials indicted in recent corruption probe

31:56 Sex trafficking and prostitution problems

34:22 How homeless people get money to buy drugs

37:22 Carjacking in SF

38:12 Lowell school's temporary replacement of meritocratic admissions with lottery & CA's Prop 16

43:06 Election fraud hurts mayoral candidates outside the right political circle

49:37 Discussion of her religion background as part of her candidacy

51:18 Problem of short housing supply has to do with City government sponsored free lawsuit service for tenants

53:44 Immigrating to SF from China as a teenager, knowing zero English and working as a seamstress