… “It was just a dude that was like, ‘I’mma kick your ass. I better not see you here,'” the rapper told MTV News on Tuesday. Because the posts were launched from the same location Wale was at rather than some far off IP address, like most Twitter hate, the DMV native decided to find their author. A video surfaced of their interaction, but at less than 20 seconds, it’s hard to decipher exactly what went down.

“I was like, ‘Yo, is this you?’ And one thing lead to another, and I just kind of mushed him a little bit,” the rapper explained, stressing that things didn’t turn violent. “Honestly, if there wasn’t kids right there, it would have went a little bit differently, but I just wanted to be conscious of them. It’s not to say it was the right decision. But in the moment, you know.”

“People get it misconstrued,” he went on. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re so butt-hurt.’ It’s not even that. I come from a place where when we was at the lunch table and n—as was jonesing on each other, I’ll respond. I’m gonna have something better, too. And now we’ve come to a place where, if you respond, you’re a bitch. Somebody could say ‘F— you’ 100 times, if I say ‘f— you’ back, then I’m a bitch. And people be like, ‘You’re famous, you shouldn’t care.’ ”

He admits that’s not the case with him, though. “I care what people say because I try to be a man of the people.”

“I just don’t understand, [in] society, why we champion people like that in this day and age,” he said. “I remember when people used to admire real people that stand behind their words or are stand-up men. I come from that. I had to address him as such. It wasn’t nothing really serious.”