or, State of the Discovrse // Discovrse of the State
(3,253 words.)
I am going to marshal all my creative skill to make this a more casual article. I am fulfilling my 2026 resolution to try less. In fact, the impetus to this entire thing was a just handful of conversations I had, which I am now flaying before you. You can’t do anything smart with that. If I do this right, it won’t feel like you’re reading at all.
I don’t like the word “based” anymore. I never did, but I also still don’t.
The precise definition has proven fluid since its introduction, but even back at the start of this whole circus of calamity it was still pretty loosey goosey. Most forget that its usage was inspired by rapper Lil B, the Based God. The meme became popular on 4chan which itself was a petri dish for dissident thought, one of many such online spaces and certainly one of the largest. It quickly became a substitute for “cool” but acutely applied to wild internet content while also contextually young and Right-coded.
Currently the word “based” has been refined to mean anything reactively heterodox, ironically embraced by both the Left and the Right, young and old. I’ve seen it utilized under a serious tone, uttered by someone attempting to discern if a subject is on the level. Are they based? Do they have based ideas? We only allow based people here.
People who are new to these sectors get very excited about applying the label to people, places, or things. It’s exciting. It’s fresh. There’s more mainstream attention now given to the Far Right than in recent memory, and a flood of mentally jailbroken individuals looking for an ideological home. Basedness is something the new adherent has tasked themselves with protecting. People in here are based, which makes them special. People out there are normies, which makes them bad. Right?
They are tempted to make the world based. We need a Based University. We need a Based LinkedIn. We need a Based Government. They can never tell you exactly what the word means, they can only identify a vibe.
This might all sound like some unc-coded coalhead oldtroon nostalgia; does Gen Z even say “based” anymore? If you wanted to kill my article, we could shake on that. But we do have an article to write, so let me wander.
The word isn’t used as frequently as it used to be, but the sentiment remains. I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson describing a certain outlaw motorcycle club and how these men would begin making out with each other to spook the squares. That’s how it is utilized: reflexive counterculture vomit. It had a time and a place: perennial and everywhere.
Sweeping away all the semantics we see the rhetorical baseline is “being retarded on purpose.” It doesn’t matter if a statement is correct, it simply captures a bombastic disregard for any system-approved framing. I can pull dozens of examples from real content creators, but for diplomatic purposes let’s just summarize some anonymously:
“Hitler is in heaven and no black people are.”
“Suntanning your balls increases your vril.”
“Having a sexual relationship with your little sister is cool actually.”
“White women fuck dogs.”
“Meth is faustian.”
These are things I have been guilty of finding amusing, even entertaining them ironically. But the nature of internet discourse is that what begins ironically ends up earnestly; attitudes are normalized and younger generations are not in on the joke. An important feature of radicalism is the longer it persists the deeper it normalizes. You remember when we talked about how ideas are traumatic, right?
A friend of mine named Black Horse published an article not long ago that attempted to assess the political implications of what we are discussing. While I disagreed with his choice to frame it in sociosexual terms, the foundation of the piece identified a real phenomenon with possible political implications. He claimed the “gamma male’s” tactics within the male hierarchy – those of radical individual critique – have been victorious over the alpha tactics of the positive vision and leadership of men.
“Gamma male psychology is possessed of the urge to rage against the duty to embody the interests and pride of the group with arguments about the Machiavellian disutility of the practice. Gamma male psychology also maximally externalizes failure, blaming the group wherever possible and curating his reputation. The careful observer will note that the Gamma male has an inherent advantage as a social media influencer over the Alpha male, and yet is incapable as a leader of men.” – The Black Horse
On a long enough timeline, this filters for the most extreme personalities, those who make the most outlandish critiques or novelty takes that work as a hack to create signal that cuts through noise. Provocative statements incite discussion. The incisiveness of a comment increases its virality. Achieving a level of rhetorical insanity inspires awe. These are the rules to succeeding in content that most can intuit. It does not matter whether or not the opinion is correct, all that matters is that it moves the needle.
(No tycoon, mogul, or entrepreneur has ever met with his friends to “talk business.”)
This has all the markers of something based, but an important distinction is that it is wrong and asinine. Even though it threatens the prevailing feminist narrative, it is a fraudulent concept forwarded by antisocial losers that will psychologically one-shot whatever 13-year-old boy sees it. Do these people genuinely believe it, and if they do what percentage of it do they believe? We may never know, but that’s beside the point: the intended audience lacks the experience to parse the outrageousness.
In many ways the political Left – Marxism and its appendages – have mastered the so-called gamma approach, building a vast ideoplex of theory to justify itself. They have been successful with its strategy of isolating the enemy and directing multitudinous critique at that group, specifically those groups perceived to have power. Historically this was capital owners but since the definition of capitalism has expanded over the 20th century it is now argued to contain the concept of Whiteness.
Even though they were the original masters of weaponized critique, their mission is different than their opponents on the Right. They take no issue with aligning with the maladaptive detritus of society to target groups with names and faces, meaning their agitation can take violent form easier. In fact, their visionary proposals for a greater society are the least attractive part of their project. In America they struggle to energize the rest of the populace with universal healthcare and border abolition. These proposals tend to fall on deaf ears, but what still works is the collectivist antipathy towards the wealthy and, especially as immigrants are welcomed into the fold, White people as archetypes for abusive power. On the other hand, the Right generally believes you must toil over the perfect social schematic at which point you can scale up.
There is a severe distrust of politics-as-usual on the Right, and most adherents would welcome the total collapse of society to provide the wretched canvas upon which to architect this ideal society. This makes Leftist political action hugely successful as a ratcheting tactic with the end goal being violence. The promise is that once these malicious entities are removed – Capitalists, Kulaks, Monarchists, White People – balance shall be restored.
The Left and Right is a permanent axis of every civilization, and its varying tensions are based on everything from the history of the region to the genetic stock. I’ve come to believe a crucial difference between the Left and Right that cuts across all cultures is Freedom vs. Order. The Far Right/Dissident Right/This Thing Of Ours concludes that there are systemic solutions to problems that can be achieved through singular authority, fueling this is the belief in ideal states of being. The Left as we know it is comprised of two central beliefs: power is morally wrong, and everything else is relative.
Being Based orbits around these first principles, flowing like an electrifying technic. A Leftist calls their opponent a cuck and it means something completely different to them as the word has been stripped of meaning. You may hear “simp” in an Ed Sheeran song by the end of the year. Cardi B draws an IQ bell curve around her ass.
The socially dissident ecosystem that Basedness emerged from appropriated this deconstructive approach through online memetic warfare, whereas the Left has failed miserably in this space while their real-world infrastructure dominates.
(The only succinct ones are made by women about how they shouldn’t have to wish they were raped.)
Acceptance of abrasive concepts expressed wildly can be understood as an essential selection process for entry into this online sphere, but it has the dual effect of permitting maladaptive people or those seeking the destruction of all social standards wherever they may be found. They would tolerate equitable chaos over inequitable order in all instances.
We must ask these emigrants: do you despise this system, or all systems? Is offending popular sentiment something you do begrudgingly, or something you relish in every instance? The tricky thing about a vibe is it’s easy to fake, especially if the gatekeepers were recently fake themselves. The filters we leverage are those of esoterism, cruelty, eccentricity, anecdotal universalism reified through vigorous research, and humour, just to name a few. Just to name mine, perhaps.
This discursive online battleground exists as a feedback loop with the goal of generating a critical mass that calls leaders from the darkness, and the reaction it breeds against itself – even internally – is essential to its form.
When that reactionary chaos becomes a stylistic qualifier unto itself it becomes an identity. It is viewed as a trendy attribute to mark if someone is an ally in this thing of ours. There’s people you may vehemently disagree with but you feel you must support them tacitly because it would be “bad optics.” You will hear phrases such as “on side” or “directionally true.” I simultaneously observe that it allows individuals to cosign strange ideas as long as it seemingly offends the status quo. For want of attacking feminism we see the embracing of philosophical homosexuality. For want of offending liberal morality we see the embracing of figures like Jeffrey Epstein.
One day everyone starts sharing “The Happy Merchant,” utterly devoid of meaning and adopted to signal affinity for a barely understood countercultural recollection, adopted by teens to let everyone know they’re different. It is like punk rock, and like punk rock it is easily corporatized by the lame.
More seriously, this is also the biggest inlet for historical enemies to sneak their way in; an expat wave of bored Liberals, embarrassed Marxists, and Anarchists who decided to pick up a book. There’s no shortage of Directional Allies who can adopt a Far-Right frame to launder their priors and, most importantly, never admit fault for their previously held, failed positions. This is the first instance of strategy over idealism. People are momentarily “on side” even if they are enemies, holding beliefs that are utterly antithetical to your own.
This strategy has one purpose: attack the system. As it turns out, a great many groups want to attack the system and the natives to this worldview have an inability to detect skinwalkers.
Extreme Offensive Reaction is treated as political strategy; it fits the vibe, which must be defended at all costs. Extremism for the love of volume. We are told to allow it all because it is directionally correct. It owns the Libs, it spooks the normies. Look how popular we are getting, we must have changed so many hearts and minds. This is what winning feels like, some say. It feels materially static.
This is not to say that radicalism ought not be first and foremost offensive to the system it seeks to disrupt. On the contrary: I assert that being based does not fit the parameters of true radicalism. It’s a job of the radical to remain radical, and never to compromise. It is not the responsibility of the radical to temper itself and negotiate. That’s important to the health of the ecosystem, and we have no interest in scolding firebrands for the distance of their aim.
With that in mind, what is reactionary must remain reactionary. That’s what basedness is: a savage, nihilistic reaction to the systems which oppose you, but the moment it attempts to make itself into a political strategy or a collective movement, it loses that edge and it becomes a contraption. This is where the sunsetting Dissident Right is stuck at the time of this writing, attempting to wish its thrashing reaction into something fit for the boardroom. Struggling in vain to whip radicals into leaders of men. Trying to turn a memetic space into a lurking government.
Radical minds should be left to pursue the purest – perhaps most extreme – version of their beliefs. But something can be both radical and misguided, it can have the tone of something real but if you scratch the paint it is revealed to be hyperreal. Something purporting to be the Caustic Truth but the recipients identify with its caustic nature rather than the truth. A turd coated in acid.
The resulting commandment is that something based must be defended because it mirrors the abrasive nature that we have come to accept as truth, not because it attempts to be a heterodox center of gravity through intensity. This outlook encourages prey positions masquerading as Machiavellianism. What grows from this toxic soil are misguided sentiments such as “There’s No Enemies To The Right,” or “NETTR.” The stated goal is to annihilate the Left at all costs by adopting their mantra of NETTL. Maintain a united front with whoever even tangentially hurts the Left, even if it’s former Leftists whose central critique is their comrades are too inept. Ana Kasparian is welcomed with open arms because she was the last hag across the finish line to notice that the trans agenda had profoundly negative consequences on her personally. A tidal wave of baffled Liberals who achieved everything they wanted and are suddenly upset that it had negative consequences, elbowing out those who had been predicting it for decades because the natives are deemed to be adolescent. The adults are now in the room, grant the fleeing rats new staff positions.
Time may have vindicated you, but you remain an incel.
To attack the based you should address the substance rather than the tone. Our brand of equitable chaos desires to give itself form as authoritarian power, and this is where the cracks form. A business is a business, a movement is a movement, and a memetic war is a memetic war; all too often we expect the three to miraculously coalesce. This isn’t a boardroom, it’s a mosh pit. It must be left to exist without further expectations. Despite this, all radicalism found within the conflagration is not created equal, and all these realities must be juggled in the air.
I came across this post and my instinct was to disagree with it, but I said nothing while ruminating it over a few hours, embedded as it was in my mind. While I don’t believe it to be completely accurate I believe it to be true enough. Before the innovations of ideology and archetypes, psycho-analysis and meta-analysis, this is how your ancestors assessed the world. While the tableau described may not resonate with every reader, it is certainly true for the majority of people, that middle of the bell curve: the Hyperpeasants. Pure critique corrodes the social fabric and pure behavior affirms it, both approaches expressed through sheer force of will.
I am reminded of the Irish Republican Army, specifically the area of South Armagh and leaders such as Tom Murphy. The IRA has been described as the gold standard for waging a guerilla war in the West, especially against an enemy of close proximity. Its astonishing capacity to inflict violence has few competitors, even in dynamic movements such as Codreanu’s Iron Guard.
Tom Murphy was a principal figure in South Armagh, one of the most aggressive and beholden to the mission of Irish Independence at whatever cost, from the militants right through to the inhabitants. While one might expect such revolutionaries to be inspired by Marxism, the majority of the army were allergic to such highfalutin intellectualism. Murphy himself would dismiss appeals to the global struggle against capitalism, seeing it as a distraction from their multi-generational mission: chasing the British away permanently.
“Jim Lynagh was into Maoism and all that sort of shite because he’d had time to read in jail. The likes of Tom Murphy and Kevin McKenna had probably never read a book in their lives. They were ordinary fellas who left school at 14 with no educational qualifications and learned everything they knew on the ground. There was no big philosophy, no desire to have high-falutin meetings or anything.” – Merlyn Rees, Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh
These men could not be negotiated with, they wanted one thing and it guided all their actions: the British out of Ireland. Whatever they could do to make the occupation of their land difficult, they would do it. It was internal strife which tore them asunder, that and degrees of desire for negotiation amongst leadership. But for the diehards, their rejection of confounding intellectualism ensured they would never be distracted, never compromise. Using Tom Murphy as but one example, here was a man of pure action, as were most of the successful bomb makers, snipers, and smugglers which made the larger war of independence globally infamous.
Every dream of power found on the Far Right can be interpreted as imposing one’s will upon the world to achieve a desired order. It is this goal that separates it from the Left, but it is not a unified mission; it is fluid, multitudinous, and multi-generational. It is far more metaphysical and philosophical. The vision is wider, the breath of the war much more expansive. This leads to a pacification of the will, and a terminal strategization of the radical.
As Nietzsche once said, or so I am told, philosophy is at its best when it’s attempting to universalize one’s particular circumstances. I don’t know for sure that he said that, or if anyone has even said it before.
Anyway, it is a valiant struggle to divine the truth in an unknown universe, but it usually falls victim to the subject’s particular life experiences, upbringing, and even genetic stock. It is that drive to universalize the particular that sits at the root of all Western inquiry, the perversion of chilled investigation by the vibrant intersections of blood, soil, and spirit. Philosophy is the blossoming of the will in an unbounded metaphysical landscape, whereas strategy is the suffocation of will. It will tell you to cease imposing your aggressive will upon the universe. It is the anesthetizing of action. It is the feminizing of ambition.
Being retarded on purpose can act as a veil for the truly retarded. Radicals must not be tone policed, but it must be proven that they can bleed. Do not yearn for a symphony from the shrieking inferno. Strategy is born in strategic environments, forged from those avatars of leadership called forth from the flames we nurture.
See? That wasn’t so bad, it was like you weren’t even reading at all I bet.