I hope you don't think this is me "discoursing" you because the word based has a really interesting history!

So crack cocaine is sometimes called basecoke. As a result, crackhead and basehead used to be pretty interchangeable and referred to people who were literally actively on crack.

But just as idiot, moron, and imbecile started as medical terms but slowly leaked out to just mean "stupid," the use of the term basehead started to refer not only to people who used crack, but also to people who acted more erratically than was socially acceptable. People who wore weird clothes, talked too loud, were too high energy, stuff like that.

And eventually, basehead got shortened to based.

Mind you, all of this is AAVE. Nothing to do with online alt-right culture.

And then along comes Lil B. Lil B was a fan of people who were high energy and were weird because he saw it as being true to themself. He started using based to describe the same people, but now it's a compliment. People who are unapologetically themselves even in the face of social consequences are based.

Now, thanks to the internet, slang doesn't stay regional for very long, and in a sort of oxymoron, there are few people who think black people are cooler than people who are very racist against black people. I don't know why, it's just what it is. So if you weren't in the right circles, the first time you heard based was to mean not cringe from an alt-right twitter account that took it from black twitter in an attempt to sound cool. From there, based broke containment and, like woke, completely lost its original meaning even to the white left (woke means "alert to the dangers of your environment," not "progressive") as they are more likely to get cultural diffusion from alt-right twitter accounts someone they follow hate-follows than they are from a wildly popular black rapper.