Ira Glasser is no Republican. He's a lifelong Jewish leftist, who was once the director of the ACLU.
He feels the modern left has lost its way, and has abandoned its long-running staunch defense of free speech. In fact, Glasser believes the ACLU itself has also abandoned its core principles, and now often takes the other side in free speech matters -- something unthinkable just 15 years ago.
(For an example, see the infamous Abigail Shrier situation, where an ACLU deputy director tweeted that he would back the banning of Shrier's book. Shrier's book was a well-researched, respectful, non-bigoted discussion of the dangers of rubber-stamping teenage gender transitions.)
Glasser says that the modern ACLU believes free speech to be incompatible with leftist goals. Therefore it wants to abandon free speech in favor of "banning hate speech" and "censoring misinformation". However, while Glasser is no fan of misinformation or hate speech, he has stated all of his life that endeavors to censor speech always result in the eventual suppression of truth and the censoring of the marginalized.
Glasser has not been shy about very vocally and vehemently criticizing what he regards as a retreat by the modern-day ACLU from the organization’s long-standing mission. He is particularly scathing about how the politicized money that has poured in has caused the group to pursue standard-issue liberal policy goals at the expense of the Constitutional rights it once uniquely and fearlessly defended. But he also recognizes that many of the ACLU lawyers, and its leadership, still have a commitment to those core values, and often are forced to battle their own staff in order to fulfill the group’s mission: a perverse conflict that is plaguing numerous political, journalistic and academic institutions.
I respect Ira Glasser's commitment to free speech -- something I have spent my entire life speaking strongly in favor of, even when it wasn't a popular position to take as a Republican 30 years ago.
The ACLU is now an abomination, and a shell of its former self.
Here's an October article about Glasser (with a link to a video interview with him), and how disgusted he is with his former organization: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/20/...er-speaks-out/
But yeah... there's no cancel culture, and no assault on free speech by the left. Just right-wing conspiracy theories coming out of Parler. Glasser must be in on it!!