Take away the anti-semitic "literature", the white supremacist flag and the fact that he is railing against blacks and Jews and it might be possible to believe that Shaun Winkler cares about nothing so much as the state of your lawn.

Sheltering in the shadow of a court building against 80 degrees of afternoon sun, the young landscape gardener certainly looks the part: his T-shirt torn and dirty, his work boots heavy, his combat trousers slack and baggy. But this week Winkler is proud to abandon his career on the land for a holiday spent standing up for what he believes in.

And what he believes in, above all else, is his mentor, the Rev Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations and an all-round racist, bigot and hate-monger. This, should there be any misunderstanding, is a description borrowed from Butler's lawyer.

Business is going well enough for the god-fearing Winkler, though fear is probably an emotion stirred more readily when the church you attend every Sunday has as its centrepiece a bust of Adolf Hitler. "I go to people's houses, they call me up and ask me to come back again," he says. "I must be doing something right."

Any non-white customers might not agree, but that is beside the point: he doesn't have any. Non-whites are statistically negligible in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and if it were otherwise, Winkler would not choose to live in this town.

Business for Butler, on the other hand, has never been worse. Twenty-five years after he moved to northern Idaho, a finger of land inserted between Washington state to the west, Montana to the east and Canada to the north, his movement is close to being crushed.

His foe is not the wave of racial impurity, against which he has inveighed for so long, but the law, albeit in an action brought by a Jewish civil rights attorney. Morris Dees is attempting to bankrupt Butler by suing him and his organisation for damages to a mother and son who claim they were terrorised by Aryan Nations guards outside the Butler compound two years ago.

A daily ritual is enacted in and around the Kootenai county court building in Coeur d'Alene, a town of 30,000 where the local fetish for huckleberry jam and milkshakes is balanced by an inordinate number of pawnshops. About two dozen policemen start to assume their positions before dawn, the road outside the courthouse barricaded off and four or five more officers with binoculars on the roof of the building.

Then there is nothing to do but wait until Butler, whose original calling was as an aeronautical engineer in California, is driven to the hearing in an aged Ford truck spewing toxic fumes and bearing licence plates proclaiming Idaho's motto: "Famous Potatoes". Inside, the case proceeds, often assisted by evidence from tattooed former members of Butler's posse.

Forty-four-year-old Victoria Keenan claims she stopped late one night outside the compound in Hayden Lake, a few miles north of Coeur d'Alene, to retrieve a wallet that her son, Jason (21), had dropped from the car.

The sound of her 1977 Datsun backfiring was the signal for three guards to descend from the Aryan Nations camp, chase them for more than two miles, fire at least five bullets and beat them up. "Because you're white we're going to let you live today," one guard is said to have told them. Two of the guards are in jail now and the other is on the run.

The Keenans, who say they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, are looking for unspecified damages. If the jury sees things their way, an award, likely to be made in the middle of next week, could leave Butler with no choice but to sell the 19-acre compound, valued at $240,000. This would not be enough to cover his liability, but would deprive the white supremacists of their core and rallying point.

Butler at first had trouble finding a lawyer, but now his defence is in the hands of Edgar Steele, who argues that the civil rights squad is attempting to turn a trivial matter into an assault on liberty: "It is still legal in this country to be a bigot. It is still legal to hate." Butler quite properly erects the twin defences of both free speech and religion contained within the first amendment (guaranteeing freedom of expression).

"Here we have a case involving two people whose presence at the entrance to the Aryan Nations in the dead of night is at least questionable, who get chased and given a good fright by rowdy members of the Aryan Nations, acting well beyond the scope of their authority, who sustain no physical and highly questionable psychological injuries."

Outside in the street, Winkler the gardener is enjoying the attention and reflecting on his creed. "I came here because there were too many non-whites in Pennsylvania. I saw non-whites commit crimes against our people and I decided to take a stand for what I think is right. It's not because they're black; it's their culture. They're animals. They're savages."

Winkler explains how he became involved with white power groups at the age of 15 when he was taken to a Ku Klux Klan rally. "There was this nigger state trooper and he told us to take off our hoods and the guy I was with said to the nigger: `You try to take off my hood and I'll punch you out.' Yeah, they took him away."

Winkler was arrested two years later. "That was just because of the communist police we have in this country." Still, it could be worse. "I heard that in Germany now you can't even give a Sieg Heil salute without being arrested."

BUT now the small talk has to stop because the court is about to adjourn for the day and that means it's time to put on a show. First there is a hunt for some bagels, which are torn into pieces so that they may be thrown at the Jewish civil rights lawyers. Then more skinheads arrive and a small corridor is formed. Above it are the Aryan Nations banner and three Confederate flags.

A man in his late 30s appears on the scene to give the zealots a pep talk. He tells them: "I don't want to see you guys yelling and screaming and getting arrested because we're better than that." Out comes Butler with his cropped white thatch, shuffling his way towards the arthritic Ford, his right hand raised towards his supporters.

The old man with the complexion of dried orange peel is helped into the truck and off he goes back to the compound, which is guarded by his three German shepherd dogs, Fritz, Nazi and Hans.

They are there to protect the church with the Hitler bust, his offices lined with extremist tracts, the watchtower, the men's and women's barracks and the shower area with a red swastika on the roof. His followers are left to trail across the car-park opposite the courthouse, chanting a ragged anthem. Four of them get into a new green Buick and drive away, pausing only to wave pedestrians across the road in front of them.

It is easy to see why Butler's lawyer wants to make much play of his contention that his opponents are trying "to paint this rag-tag band of borderline derelicts as a highly organised, well-trained and disciplined military organisation". But Aryan Nations is taken seriously enough by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms: seven "photographers" covering the case had their media credentials removed after it emerged that they were actually federal agents.

Steve Judy, the town's mayor, cannot bear the image of Idaho as a playground for racists as well as the more innocent outdoor types drawn to its 18 million acres of protected wilderness. "Human rights groups outnumber hate groups here 10 to one," said the mayor.

"Richard Butler is not that big a deal. We're talking about nine people living there full-time. The biggest problem is the message of hate he sends out and the link to our region."

It is true that until this point nothing has been pinned on Butler personally, but moonlighting Aryans were among members of the Order, another far-right group, that murdered a Denver talk-show host and conducted a string of violent robberies in the 1980s; members of the Aryan Republican Army, responsible for 22 bank raids 10 years later to finance a white revolution, were linked to Butler; and Bufford Furrow, who is accused of wounding three children and two adults at a Jewish community centre in Los Angeles last year before murdering a postman, is a former Aryan Nations security guard.

Whatever the outcome of the court case, no matter the future for Butler, buffoon or soldier for a Caucasian nirvana, Winkler the gardener is not going to go away. "They can take our land, but they can't take Aryan Nations from our hearts."