One of the many and I want to stress completely unsubstantiated claims that Bardfinn has made about himself is that he supposedly has 30 years of experience as a Nazi hunter tracking down white supremacists and anti-semites. He made this claim about himself in the following post in /r/AgainstHateSubreddits:

I spent three decades of Sundays studying white supremacists and Holocaust deniers (but I repeat myself)

My reading room had three walls of bookshelves filled with pamphlets, brochures, flyers, handouts, meeting minutes, law enforcement records liberated under FOIA, small-press books, videocassettes, CD's, audio cassettes, and hardbacks, put out by everyone from the KKK to Richard Spencer. I've written software to trace the evolution of their shitty anti-culture from post-Weimar Lutheranism in Western Europe and the propaganda forgeries of post-Czarist Russia to the discussion boards of Stormfront and Reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/d3vn43/holocaust_denial_from_rfragilejewishredditor/f05w58o/ http://archive.is/https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/d3vn43/holocaust_denial_from_rfragilejewishredditor/f05w58o/

Bardfinn was 45 years old at the time of this post. If he has spent 30 years studying and tracking down white supremacists, that means he started studying them when he was only 15 years old, which is highly unlikely. I did a search online to see if there was any evidence of man named "Steven Joel Akins"* being involved with antifa groups or any kind of serious anti-fascist research and I couldn't find anything at all. There is no evidence that this man has ever been involved with any kind of serious anti-fascist research.

• no, this is not doxxing, Bardfinn was public about his IRL identity for years in the mainstream media, his name is in the public domain and I am free to reference it in the context of explicitly fact-checking his supposed stated credentials on Reddit.

What I did find was the following, which is "interesting" to say the least.

I discovered that there is a guy named "Stephen E. Atkins" (not "Akins"), who is the author of The Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History which came out in 2011:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Encyclopedia_of_Right_Wing_Extremism_In.html?id=X7ad8GzRf0QC&redir_esc=y

According to Steven Atkins, author of The Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History, Metzger's ideology "differs from other white supremacists by rejecting the basic tenets of the Christian Identity movement because he considers himself to be the champion of the Third Position. The Third Position is a form of racism that is oriented towards attracting the white working class and it is also anti-capitalist in orientation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Metzger

Bardfinn's powerword is "Akins", not "Atkins"... but we have to ask, is he deliberately trying to create a confusion between his name and the name of the guy who wrote the above Encyclopedia, so that people will assume that "Stephen E. Atkins" and "Steven J. Akins" are the same person? I cannot find any information about this "Stephen E. Atkins", he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth after that one book on the far right. Either this person has had to go underground or into witness protection after publishing the book or... he might have published the book under a pseudonym. However, the fact that this author with a somewhat similar name to Bardfinn's IRL name made me wonder whether Penny's claims of studying the far right for 30 years were meant to create a deliberate confusion between his name "Steven Akins" and this author's name "Steven Atkins" in order to create the impression that Penny himself is the author of this encyclopedia. Could that be happening here?

I also found this Livejournal:

http://steven-akins.livejournal.com/

And this forum discussion:

Vanguard News Network Forum > Clownage > Nutzpah Lounge Reload this Page Poll: Should Steve Akins be confined to the Tard Corral for... https://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=140075&page=6

If you look at the discussion on this page, the Steven L. Akins in question was eventually banned.

There's a lot of hits for this "Steven L. Akins" on Google. Apparently there was also a far right winger who was a pedophile who was using the name "Steven L. Akins":

That was the revelation that caused Linder to characterize White Nations as a home for “sex deviants.” But he had other reasons. One is another White Nations regular who was banned from VNN last January — Stephen Lewis Akins of Jasper, Ala. Linder kicked him off VNN after Akins, who used “Steven L. Akins” on VNN, began posting about his interest in underage girls, at one point writing “Old enough to drive, old enough to ride.” Akins also posted pornographic images of young girls — photos that were rapidly pulled down by VNN’s administrators — and referred to pedophiles as “normal members of society as they aren’t queers or race-mixers.” Akins’ comments elicited this from “Angel Ramsey” on VNN: “Why does it not surprise me that Akins would be on a pedophile thread. Rolleyes.”

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2013/09/05/leith-revelations-spark-battle-between-white-supremacist-forums

That's really interesting. Why would a white power pedophile pick a forum name that is almost identical to Bardfinn's real name? Just a coincidence, or deliberate shitposting?

As you know, Bardfinn has complained about Reddit users falsely accusing him of being a pedophile himself and calling LE on him. Perhaps they came across that same article on the SPLC website I quoted above and wrongly assumed that the "Steven L. Akins" discussed in that SPLC article was Bardfinn.

However, considering Bardfinn's now notorious, widely read, widely condemned and frankly rather bizarre Reddit rant trying to exculpate incest (quote: "incest is not unethical", Bardfinn apparently thought he could defend the indefensible), one can forgive these Reddit users for making that mistake.

Then there is that Bitchute video (originally posted on Youtube) from the former AHS member who claimed that he was asked on a private Discord server by AHS to deliberately post CP on subreddits that AHS wanted to take down in order to create an excuse justifying suspension by Reddit Admins. Bardfinn insists that this video testimony was false and that the screengrabbed images of a Discord exchange shown in the video were Photoshopped to smear him and AHS. However, in the context of all the other dirty tactics that AHS are known to employ against their chosen enemies, the suggestion made in the Bitchute video doesn't seem that far fetched. Not saying it's true, just pointing out that AHS are known to play dirty to get what they want.

I found this all very very strange, especially after seeing the Bitchute video, so I thought I'd share my research with you guys. If anyone wants to look into this further and deeper than I did, go ahead.

Suffice to say, Bardfinn's claims that he's an experienced Nazi hunter with 30 years (since the age of 15!) studying and tracking down white supremacists, that claim is completely and utterly unsubstantiated. As far as I can tell, Bardfinn has no credentials at all in the anti-fascist research field. If anyone else has been able to find any hard evidence backing Bardfinn's alleged past as a Nazi hunter, by all means share your evidence. I haven't been able to find anything at all.