AN AMERICAN BOMBING:
The road to april 19th (2024)

AVAILABLE ON HBO AND HBO MAX

Synopsis

An American Bombing, the Road to April 19th looks at the current surge in political violence through the story of the Oklahoma City bombing. It is a big-picture statement film that retells the highlights of the case in the larger context of what was driving anti-government sentiment from the 1980s to the present. Today’s division and polarization were in play at the time of the bombing but it seems to have spread, deepened, and gone mainstream. The film takes us back to see what we can learn that might help prevent more civil unrest and domestic terrorism.

“While the timing of “An American Bombing” seems clearly intended to counter current political rhetoric concerning deep-state conspiracies and QAnon insanity, it is never dismissive. There are genuine causes for anger and indignation rooted in Ruby Ridge and Waco. Tracing current hard-right sentiments to the farm crisis of the ’70s, An American Bombing presents that event as a bipartisan betrayal: Richard Nixon told the farmers to plant, Jimmy Carter banned export of their crops to the Soviet Union (over the invasion of Afghanistan), and Ronald Reagan refused them a bailout. Farm failures followed, as did anger. What Mr. Levin and his producer, Daphne Pinkerson, do, while justifying nothing, is separate the righteously angry from the opportunistic and the people with legitimate grievances from the exploiters of those grievances. They show how, almost inevitably, an anti-government movement allied itself with hate groups of every stripe.”

— John Anderson