* Note: To avoid confusion with Arianna Huffington's media project, the Huffington Post, and her husband, Michael Huffington, we will refer to her as "Arianna".

Exploitation of Struggling Writers

Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about. . . . If Huffington has a conscience, she will sit down when the AOL check arrives and make sure every cent of it is paid out to those who worked free or at minimal wages for her over the last six years, starting with Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the “clinging to guns and religion” story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and spent two years writing and reporting without a salary. “She strung me along for two years while I repeatedly asked for funding for three projects, and then I quit,” Fowler told me from Oakland, Calif., as I spoke with her by phone. When Fowler, whom the site nominated twice for a Pulitzer, finally resigned last year in disgust, Mario Ruiz, the spokesperson for The Huffington Post, acidly told Yahoo News: “Mayhill Fowler says that she is ‘resigning’ from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?”

—Chris Hedges on Arianna's $315 million sale of the Huffington Post to AOL; February 2011

Smoking Gun Quotes

"The greatest tragedy of the modern welfare state is that we have allowed it to deprive us of a fundamental opportunity to practice virtue, responsibility, generosity and compassion."

—From Arianna's The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul, which The New Republic described as a "mix of Deepak Chopra and Milton Friedman."

"Women's Lib claims that the achievement of total liberation would transform the lives of all women for the better, the truth is that it would transform only the lives of women with strong lesbian tendencies. . . . The frenetic extremism of Women's Lib seeks not to emancipate women, but to destroy society."

—From Arianna's debut book, The Female Woman: An Argument Against Women’s Liberation for Female Emancipation

“Once democracy is established as a fundamentally economic concept, as it unambiguously has been in Sweden and is increasingly becoming so elsewhere in the West, then it functions solely for economic egalitarianism and it can be made to embrace any degree of tyranny provided more prosperity, more security and more social welfare are guaranteed.”

— From After Reason, Arianna's New Age libertarian manifesto, in which she equates democracy, egalitarianism and a desire for economic security with totalitarianism and tyranny.

“...both the women's movement and the Great Society were spectacular disasters. They maintained the big lie that government, the federal father up in the sky, is going to take care of all social disputes and kiss away every economic boo-boo. They contributed to the breakup of the American family and they also contributed to the politicization of American life."

—Arianna on "Firing Line," December 7, 1994

“Until we dismantle the welfare state, until we dismantle bilingual education, until we dismantle multi-cultural experiments, we need to drastically reduce the high levels of immigration.”

—Arianna on "Firing Line," June 16, 1995

"... worrying about voter turnout puts the cart before the horse. Theoretically, voting is an informed choice . . . Unfortunately, most people are as uninformed about politics as I am about college basketball. My solution: Make voting contingent upon the completion of a certain number of hours of community service . . . The immediate effect of this . . . proposal would probably be to reduce participation even further."

—"Make Voting Harder, Not Easier;" American Enterprise Institute; 1997

Current Cult Connections

Arianna remains in a cult that most abandoned after its guru sexually and financially exploited many of his followers.

In a 1994 TV interview during her husband's senate campaign, Arianna falsely denied on camera that she was never a member of the John-Roger cult, claiming: "I am a born-again Christian." But in 2003, Arianna's ex-husband Michael Huffington told the New York Times that cult leader John-Roger "has more influence on [Arianna] than anyone else in the world."

In 2007, Arianna had several Huffington Post employees attend multi-day Insight Seminars put on by a non-profit group controlled by Arianna's cult guru John-Roger. Insight Seminars were created to funnel money into the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) cult, according to the Los Angeles Times, which quoted one Insight facilitator saying that the seminars were "inspired, in part, by Amway techniques."

In 2011, shortly after selling HuffPo to AOL, Insight University gave Arianna a "Transformational Leaders Award" for her work in "revolutionizing" news. Insight University is a John-Roger cult non-accredited degree mill that offers Ed.D. degrees at a cost of "approximately $31,860."

In March 2012, Arianna spoke at a benefit for Insight University.

The Huffington Post employs Russell Bishop, who founded Insight Seminars with cult leader John-Roger, as editor of the site's "GPS for the Soul" section. HuffPo currently hosts the blog of John Morton, second-in-command of MSIA, and frequently features bloggers who promote the cult's films and books.

Cult Video Evidence

From a 1994 Nightline program in which Ted Koppel talks with mental health counselor and cult specialist Steven Hassan about Arianna's involvement in John-Roger's Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness cult, who described it as a "pyramid structured authoritarian regime that uses human recruitment and mind control techniques to keep people dependent and obedient. People are instilled with phobias. If they question John-Roger, if they ever leave the group terrible things will happen to them." Watch:

A 1994 TV interview in which Arianna falsely denied on camera that she was ever a member of the John-Roger cult:

Front Group Connections

In 1995, she co-founded the Center for Effective Compassion, a religious free-market outfit that served as "a conduit for right-wing dollars to reach strategic conservative causes." The Center was a project of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a pro-deregulation front group launched by Gingrich and funded by tobacco, pharma and the telecommunication industry.