Shirt with Nazi salute was briefly sold on Walmart’s website

Claim:

In November 2025, Walmart.com sold a shirt containing a fascist salute pictured over a raised fist and the caption “paper beats rock.”

Rating:

Context

Multiple third-party sellers listed the shirt, which was a clear violation of Walmart’s prohibited products policy, on the retailer’s website through the Walmart Marketplace program. Social media users quickly started a campaign to report the shirt’s listings. Walmart has since removed listings of the shirt.

In November 2025, posts online claimed retail giant Walmart’s website was selling “Nazi shirts.” The posts contained images of the shirt’s listing on Walmart.com and lambasted the company for allowing a shirt promoting Nazism on its website. The shirt contained an image of the Nazi salute over a raised fist and the caption “paper beats rock.”

Snopes readers wrote in asking whether it was true that the shirt was listed for sale on Walmart’s website.

We found an archived version of a page where one third-party seller had listed the shirt on Walmart’s website, although the company has since removed the listing for violating its prohibited products policy, which explicitly bans “items, media, or propaganda associated with Nazism.” We reached out to Walmart to ask about how it vets third party sellers and detects listings that break its prohibited products policy, but had not heard back at time of publication.

Explaining the symbolism

The shirt’s caption is, theoretically, a rock-paper-scissors “joke.” 

The “paper” refers to the Nazi salute (also called the Roman salute or just the fascist salute), performed by placing one’s right hand on one’s left shoulder, then extending the right arm at an upward angle until it’s straight, keeping the palm face-down. The salute was in the news earlier in 2025 when, at Trump’s inauguration rally on Jan. 20, tech billionaire Elon Musk made a gesture that some observers described as matching the Nazi salute.

The “rock,” meanwhile, refers to the raised fist, a symbol most prominently associated with the Black Power movement, though other groups (from both sides of the political spectrum) have used it. 

“Paper beats rock” therefore suggests that Nazism or fascism would defeat Black activist movements, often associated with left-wing politics. 

Users banded together to report the shirt

Once the shirt had been shared widely online, social media users took it upon themselves to get listings removed. One post on the r/MarchAgainstNazis subreddit provided a phone number and an online form to report the listings, for instance. When Snopes checked the listings the morning of Nov. 10, they had all been taken down. 

A Walmart spokesperson told the online outlet Left Coast Right Watch, which covers politics and extremism, that “the items in question were listed by a third-party seller and have been removed from our site for violating our prohibited products policy.”

That policy bans items that “promote intolerance, hate, humiliation or the mistreatment of others due to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, body image or similar characteristics.” 

This wasn’t the first time Walmart has removed far-right shirts from its online marketplace. According to a September 2024 Rolling Stone article, the retailer took down two shirts for a white-power band called Skrewdriver.

Sources

Bennhold, Katrin. “What Elon Musk’s Salute Was All About.” The New York Times, 24 Jan. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/world/europe/elon-musk-roman-salute-nazi.html.

Blistein, Jon. “Why Was Walmart Selling White Nationalist T-Shirts?” Rolling Stone, 23 Sept. 2024, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/skrewdriver-shirts-sale-walmart-website-white-nationalist-1235109723/.

Goodman, J. David. “Raised-Fist Salute Has Varied Meanings.” The Lede, 1334599671, https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/raised-fist-salute-has-varied-meanings/.

In History: How Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s Protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics Shook the World. 16 Oct. 2023, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20231011-in-history-how-tommie-smith-and-john-carloss-protest-at-the-1968-mexico-city-olympics-shook-the-world.

Liles, Jordan. “Did Musk Give ‘Nazi Salute’ at Trump’s 2025 Inauguration Rally? Here’s What We Know.” Snopes, 21 Jan. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//news/2025/01/20/musk-nazi-salute/.

“Prohibited Products: Walmart Marketplace Policy.” Walmart Marketplace Learn, https://marketplacelearn.walmart.com/guides/Prohibited-products-policy:-offensive-content. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Watch, Left Coast Right. About LCRW | Left Coast Right Watch. https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/about/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

———. WALMART SOLD FAR-RIGHT EXTREMIST SHIRTS ONLINE, AGAIN | Left Coast Right Watch. https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/articles/walmart-sold-far-right-extremist-shirts-online-again/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.