An American Bombing Delivers a Potent Warning About Right-Wing Extremism

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. HBO’s new documentary An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th doesn’t just revisit this horrific event but methodically details its origins in white male grievance and entitlement.

Director Mark Levin, producer Daphne Pinkerson, and executive producer Katie Couric deliver a compelling journalistic study that connects the dots between right-wing domestic terror attacks over the past 40 years. The result is tragically relevant, as the hatred behind the Oklahoma City bombing also fueled the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooting in 2018 and the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack. Footage of a young Merrick Garland discussing the case reinforces the point, making the madness feel wearily cyclical. He prosecuted Timothy McVeigh and later oversaw the prosecution of January 6 insurrectionists as attorney general. 

When McVeigh ignited a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, he murdered 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 680 others. The immediate response was horror and disbelief: This couldn’t happen “here.” People assumed the culprits were Middle Eastern terrorists, specifically individuals who looked nothing like the very middle American McVeigh. Former President Bill Clinton, who’s interviewed at length, urged against jumping to conclusions, and he recounts here how he came to believe this was a homegrown attack. In 1995, that seemed inconceivable, but 30 years later, violent right-wing extremism is an escalating threat.

The 2017 PBS documentary Oklahoma City sometimes felt too much like a pat rundown of events that had already aired on broadcast TV, but it did effectively argue that McVeigh’s extremist ideology wasn’t isolated to a disturbed few. An American Bombing advances that argument further and in more detail. The documentary boasts firsthand accounts and reflections from survivors, journalists, and law enforcement. Levin, Pinkerson, and Couric convincingly demonstrate that the attack didn’t exist in a vacuum but was part of a larger anti-American movement that has only grown in strength since 1995 and entered the chambers of Congress.

Clinton had successfully passed an assault weapons ban in 1994, which George W. Bush would let lapse a decade later. This sensible gun safety legislation infuriated McVeigh, a former soldier who’d served in the Gulf War and afterward suffered a nervous breakdown. He lacked the self-awareness to realize he was the very person who shouldn’t have access to assault weapons. Instead, he and his fellow right-wing paranoids were convinced the government was out to get them. The Ruby Ridge raid in 1992 and the failed Waco siege in 1993 had inspired them to “strike back,” even if it meant targeting innocent civilians. 

An American Bombing features clips of the late Rush Limbaugh lamenting that America is no longer “your country.” There was never any doubt that his definition of “your” was more racially exclusive than the most restrictive country club. The documentary directly links Limbaugh’s rhetoric to the growing radicalization of men like McVeigh. 

An emerging internet also played a key role in enabling organization among so-called “lone wolves” who might’ve previously never worked effectively with others. McVeigh and his accomplices were part of the “leaderless resistance,” an approach adopted by right-wing movements in an effort to evade government agencies. An American Bombing argues that heightened communication during the 1990s only served to further separate Americans.

Because Oklahoma City was in fact an “American” bombing, there’s a greater urge to understand McVeigh’s motivations than if he were one of the 9/11 terrorists. “They resent our freedom” was considered sufficient motivation for radical Islamic mass murder. The documentary seeks to explain, while never rationalizing, white middle American resentment and anger and does a better job than similar efforts in mainstream media. 

The key event is traced back to the 1970s farming crisis, when midwestern farmers took on significant debt to buy more land, encouraged by President Richard Nixon. Later, President Jimmy Carter would ban exports of crops to the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. Finally, President Ronald Reagan refused to bail out the struggling farmers. Millions of farms were foreclosed upon. 

Nixon and Reagan were Republicans, and none of the leaders involved were Black or Jewish. Nonetheless, that’s who disgruntled right-wingers in the heartland blamed for their misfortune, and they held overwhelming contempt for the U.S. government, which they saw as elevating undeserving minorities while ignoring “real” Americans. Archival clips of white supremacists and neo-Nazis ranting against the system are shown, and they sound disturbingly like something commonly heard on today’s right-wing media. An American Bombing consistently reinforces how so many twisted sentiments have entered the political mainstream with only the most minor polish.

There’s even an early, eerie reflection of January 6 when Stuart Wright describes desperate farmers’ resentment toward the federal government against the visual backdrop of people pushing past cops and storming into buildings. This is the major advantage An American Bombing has over Oklahoma City. So much has occurred since 2017 that reinforces the documentary’s somewhat bleak premise: Oklahoma City was not an outlier, but a precursor to an active threat today. 

Although McVeigh was successfully apprehended, prosecuted, and made to answer for his crimes, An American Bombing doesn’t offer a cheerful resolution. Ultimately, regret is the documentary’s prevailing theme.This isn’t about how McVeigh was defeated, but how his self-declared war on the U.S. has continued. 

However, the documentary doesn’t present McVeigh as a misguided martyr, and despite McVeigh’s own grandstanding efforts, he ultimately comes across as a supporting player in a much larger American tragedy. It deftly balances presenting him as both a remorseless monster and a pathetic dupe, someone callously naive enough to compare the Murrah building to the Death Star from Star Wars, where he imagines innocent people were also killed when the heroic Rebels destroyed it. 

An American Bombing offers a few hopeful notes. McVeigh’s co-conspirator Terry Nichols was spared the death penalty but has sought redemption while serving multiple life sentences. Miraculously, Kathy Sanders, who lost two grandchildren in the bombing, has found it in her heart to forgive both Nichols and McVeigh, who was executed in 2001. Clinton wonders what might have happened if he’d known McVeigh as a child and befriended him. The former president laments that McVeigh “believed our differences were greater than what we have in common,” but when Clinton’s words are contrasted with footage from January 6, it seems to vindicate McVeigh’s cynicism.  

Clinton grimly suggests that McVeigh’s hateful, unhinged rhetoric sounds almost “mainstream” today. “It’s like he won,” the former president says. That’s a chilling statement, and one for which An American Bombing has no counterargument. It’s not uplifting viewing, but the documentary delivers a potent warning: McVeigh might’ve died in 2001 but what he represents still lives with us.

An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th premieres April 16 at 9:00 P.M. ET on HBO and Max. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Stephen Robinson is a political columnist, arts writer, and theatre maker.