Clifford D. May (born 1951) is an American journalist, editor, political activist, and podcast host. He is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank created shortly after the 9/11 attacks, where he hosts the podcast Foreign Podicy. He is the weekly "Foreign Desk" columnist for The Washington Times. May previously served as commissioner on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission that makes policy recommendations concerning international religious freedom, as well as the Chairman of the Policy Committee department within the Committee on the Present Danger. May was also previously a weekly columnist for Scripps Howard News Service and National Review Online. May has been widely published, including in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Commentary, USA Today, and The Atlantic. He has served as a reporter, a foreign correspondent, and a newspaper/magazine editor, working notably for Newsweek in the 1970s and for The New York Times in the 1980s. May is also a member of the Henry Jackson Society. In October 2007, The Daily Telegraph named May number 94 in its list of the "100 most influential conservatives in America", identifying him as a neo-conservative within the Republican Party. Career Early career May earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York in 1973. He then earned master's degrees from both Columbia University's School of Public and International Affairs and its School of Journalism. In addition, he holds a certificate in Russian language and literature from Leningrad University. May worked as an associate editor of Newsweek from 1975 to 1978. He then became a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers and worked for CBS Radio News and Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS as well. For all three outlets, he covered the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Returning to the U.S., he became senior editor of Geo Magazine. May then spent about a decade with The New York Times serving as an editor of the Sunday magazine, a New York City and Washington reporter and as a foreign correspondent. He opened the Times' West Africa bureau and worked as its chief. He then moved to Denver, Colorado to be associate editor of the Rocky Mountain News. He started writing a weekly political and social criticism column that was distributed nationally by Scripps Howard News Service. He also hosted two weekly television