The roots of the "FEMA death camps" meme might go back to the Reagan adminsitration and some of the loonies who worked in gummint at that time, but the elaborate tales, of 107,000 white boxcars with built-in shackles, boxcars with guillotines smuggled in from China disguised as cargo containers and long lists of "death camp" locations- which are still circulating among the patrons of the Alcoa Haberdashery Shoppe- seem, AFAIK, to date to the early to mid '90s.
Many of these tales first circulated on USENET; when I did some looking into this stuff a few years ago I found posts dated 1995 on "patriot" (read militia) newsgroups trashing the "white boxcars" claims, which indicates that these tales were in circulation earlier than that.* Unfortunately, the ephemeral nature of 'net dialogue being what it is, the earliest posts pertaining to any of these tales that I can now find via Google Groups are from 1996.
The copyright date on that Chick tract would be interesting. The mo-ped with a guillotine (and we think some SUVs are top-heavy
) is probably lifted from the Chinese-made boxcar with guillotines claim.** The date of the tract would at least set a lower bound on the age of that story.
*Some sources trace the "107,000 white boxcars with built-in shackles" story to Phil Schneider, a well-known UFO loony who committed suicide in 1996.
**Unless Chick is familiar with the career of
Victor Hugues, who trundled a portable guillotine brought from France around the island of Guadeloupe, chopping off the heads of suspected counterrevolutionaries.
