Comment by supportengineer

>maybe in the Midwest, or West Virginia

My family is from the "decent hard-working" part of mid-America and I am the only one without a felony so whenever one of my relatives dies, I get their guns. It used to be the crime of choice was check fraud but now it's simple burglary and drugs.

I as a non-gang, non-dealing, tall middle aged white dude am safer in Baltimore than I am at the local gas station full of tweakers in "real" America.

West Virginia has the highest, by a lot, percentage of people on social security disability because their state doesn't have good welfare benefits. All of the decent folk figured out how to scam the government out of disability payments by lying about back and stomach pain.

In Wyoming County West Virginia >33% of all adults aged 18-64 are on disability. These aren't broken down coal miners they are normal, healthy, unemployed people.

My county? 6%.

The only parts of America where people aren't trying to scam each other are uninhabited.

If you go as a tourist to a place in the US that doesn’t get a lot of tourists, like a small Midwest city, people will happily give you recommendations of things to see and do. The same if you go in a neighborhood bar or coffee shop in a big city neighborhood that’s not overtouristed.

Nobody will try to charge you the tourist rate because there isn’t one. There may be scammers and shady merchants operating in town but you will not be their primary target.

Those places are all over the US but just not very interesting. Ft. Davis (or maybe Alpine) Texas is what you're describing but no one really goes there because it's just a small town with people working and living their lives as best they can. There's nothing to attract any outside attention really. I only know that area because of my wife introducing me to Marfa TX which does a little bit of tourism because of the Judd foundation.

I fell in love with that part of Texas and the people. My wife and I were married in Marathon which is in a ~75 mile radius of the towns i listed above

i'd generally expect that if they're an american and theyre talking to you, there's likely a scam.

if you arent somewhere to mutually enjoy something, they're there to sell something

West Virginia is a deeply red state; I don't think you want to go there to avoid scams. It's pervasive in the US because the political leadership is all now scam culture, all the time. Trump is, at core, a corrupt, subliterate, small-time real estate huckster. Everybody he's surrounded himself with is either an insincere grifter or severely mentally ill. And they're running the federal government and the red states, and trying to destroy the state governments of the blue ones.