Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government told Breitbart News Daily that National Review’s latest cover story attacking America’s working class communities as places that “deserve to die” is both “fundamentally wrong” and “morally reprehensible.”

Manning, a respected grassroots conservative leader, spoke with Breitbart Executive Chairman and SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon about the rebuttal of National Review’s article that he wrote for Breitbart.

As Bannon noted, National Review, which published an entire “Against Trump” special issue in January denouncing the GOP frontrunner, has now focused its ire on Trump’s supporters in a new issue featuring a cover story by Kevin D. Williamson, which argues that the working class communities these Trump voters represent “deserve to die.”

“It is one thing in a political context to say, ‘We don’t like this candidate over another candidate.’ That’s perfectly legitimate,” Manning said. “But in this article, Kevin Williamson, the author, attacks the people who support Trump, he attacks the people who work for a living.”

“It isn’t really about Trump when you get down to it,” Manning reasoned. “It’s about people who feel they’ve been left behind by an economy where we see our jobs exported overseas, where we see environmentalists shutting down a factory, shutting down the mills, and we see government regulations working against [us]. We feel as if the government itself is working against us, and the system is all rigged to benefit the people who have lobbyists in DC and against the people who are just trying to make a living and raise their families and go to church and do all the things we do in our lives that don’t have anything to do with what’s happening in Washington, DC or state capitals or even our local town halls. And it’s those people that Kevin Williamson in the National Review article basically said, ‘It’s your fault. Stop being a crybaby. Load up your trucks and move to the big city and see what you can do there.’ And it was fundamentally wrong. It was morally reprehensible, and so I felt I had to call him out.”

Characterizing the National Review cover story as “stunning and shocking,” Bannon noted that the magazine’s writers “hope for really the implosion, demise, and destruction of white working class communities throughout the country.”

When he first saw the article, Bannon said he thought, “That’s got to be a parody. That has to be tongue-in-cheek. Then I read it, and it was so mean and so vicious that it kind of stunned me.”

Manning agreed, saying, “People really do need to read the article because it’s so vile. It’s so out-of-touch. It’s so inside-the-Beltway elitist that it’s almost impossible to believe that somebody sat down and wrote it and somebody else read it and edited it and said, ‘This is suitable for publication.’”

“And what makes it even worse,” he added, “is it’s the cover story on National Review. It’s the cover story! It’s the thing they’re trying to drive people in to read their magazine. And it’s astonishing in its breadth and in its real cruelty towards people who work for a living.”

Williamson’s article, Manning explained, tells working class Americans that “it’s their fault that their communities are dead. And they should just walk away from their communities, walk away from their lives, and just accept their fate.”

Manning passionately rebutted this notion. “The people who are losing their jobs because of government regulations like the Endangered Species Act regulations that deal with the spotted owl in the northwest, which destroyed timber communities and created a number of ghost towns all over the northwest, those people lost jobs because the federal government decided they wanted an owl and not those people’s jobs,” he said. “It’s not their fault when the federal government chooses to shut down their industries.”

He continued: “It’s not the fault of an autoworker whose job gets sent overseas because we’ve created trade laws which make more sense to have jobs exported than imported.”

“And it’s certainly not the fault of a textile worker in South Carolina or North Carolina who saw their jobs go overseas because it became more efficacious to create the same thing in a Central American country due to CAFTA,” Manning said.

But he noted that “rather than examining the policies that are creating the dislocation, creating the gap, and taking away hope,” National Review is “clinging to the policies.”

In contrast, Manning offered what he sees as “the conservative answer” to these problems:

We need to lower our corporate tax rate so corporations can make money making stuff here. We need to cut the regulatory burdens that make it so that the cost of employing people is so high that it makes no sense to hire somebody here rather than hiring somebody in Mexico or Indonesia. And we need we need to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would further the problem, and instead … put together trade deals that benefit both the American consumer and the country we’re dealing with. And you only do that if you create the level playing field first by lowering the corporate tax rate and cutting the regulatory burdens so we as Americans can compete with a level government playing field with these other countries. And at that juncture, we will win competitively, we will win jobs, we will be and return to the 21th century America that you and I grew up with – the one where people have an expectation that … their kids will have a better future than they have. And that expectation has been lost in America right now, and we need to get it back.

Listen to the full audio of Manning’s interview below:

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Follow Rebecca Mansour on Twitter @RAMansour