Italians are fed up and some are no longer waiting for permission to protect their own. 🇮🇹 💪 In Milan this weekend, cost-of-living marches quickly collapsed into the familiar pattern of hooded youths smashing windows, looting Carrefour, Decathlon, Levi’s, Under Armour and other stores, setting fires, wrecking cars, and attacking police. Hundreds of mostly very young people (many minors) were detained or identified. Damage estimates already run into the hundreds of thousands of euros. Amid the chaos, regular citizens pushed back. One Milan shop owner grabbed a baton and carried out a citizen’s arrest on a looter walking out of his store with stolen goods. Footage of the moment has gone viral as a symbol of ordinary people refusing to watch their livelihoods get stripped. At the looted Carrefour on Via Torino, security staff who tried to block the entrance were beaten with sticks. Shop owners, workers, and residents in the city center were left with smashed glass, empty shelves, and frightened customers while small groups of casseurs hit and ran. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been clear: “Demonstrating is a right. Setting our cities ablaze is not.” She called the perpetrators “gangs of hooligans” and “thugs who exploit demonstrations to sow chaos, attack those responsible for ensuring security and hold entire cities hostage.” She praised the police for protecting “citizens, workers, merchants and all the people who have the right to live in their city without fear and without seeing it laid to waste.” She has called a security summit and reiterated that peaceful protest is legitimate while this level of criminal violence is not. This is the real divide. Italians who work, pay taxes, and run businesses versus those who treat city centers as free loot zones the moment a march starts. When the state is stretched, citizens are stepping in to hold the line. That instinct, defending property, family, and neighborhood, is not extremism. It is normal. Enough with the excuses. Law, order, and the right to defend what’s yours.