MSNBC host Joy Reid infuriated Mr Rittenhouse’s supporters by criticising his “white male tears” and comparing his testimony to that of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Ms Reid argued in a TikTok video that Mr Rittenhouse was using emotion in his testimony in the same way that Justice Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee, did in 2018 when he testified before Congress after being accused of sexual assault by a high school classmate.

The cable news host said Justice Kavanaugh “cried his way through the hearings to make him a permanent member” of the high court. “His tears turned out to be more powerful than the tears of Christine Blasey Ford. Which were the tears of an alleged victim,” she said.

“But in America, there’s a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears, particularly male white tears. Really, white tears in general, because that’s what Karens are, right? They Karen out, and then as soon as they get caught, it’s bring the waterworks,” she added.

“White men can get away with that too. And it has the same effect, even as the right tries to politicise the idea that masculinity is being robbed from American men by multiculturalism and wokeism. They still want to be able to have their tears.”

The Independent’s Gustaf Kilander reports:

Jurors reconvened at the Kenosha County courthouse for a third day of deliberation at 9am CT on Thursday.

Wednesday’s proceedings ended with the panel reviewing video evidence of the shootings.

It remains unclear how long it will take for jurors to reach a unanimous verdict on the five felony charges against Mr Rittenhouse.

Journalist Bari Weiss admonished the mainstream media’s coverage of the Rittenhouse trial in a Substack article on Wednesday.

“Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third… It turns out that account was mostly wrong,” Ms Weiss wrote.

“Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting… you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night,.”

The journalist, who resigned from the New York Times last year citing outrage with “cancel culture”, went on to accuse the media of running a “disinformation campaign” to convict Mr Rittenhouse before the jury has a chance to make its decision.

As Kyle Rittenhouse‘s trial has played out in the Kenosha courtroom of Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder, moments of apparent deference to the defendant have struck many observers as curiously different from how murder proceedings often unfold.

Schroeder addressed some of these observations Wednesday, saying “people should have confidence in the outcome of the trial.” He called some coverage of the case “frightening.”

Schroeder, the longest-serving circuit judge in Wisconsin, said he’s been letting defendants draw jury alternates’ numbers for an estimated 20 years.

He explained Wednesday that he started doing it after the trial of a Black man when there was only one Black person on the jury and that person was dismissed after the court clerk drew the juror as an alternate.

Schroeder said that while there was nothing wrong with the way the alternate was picked, the optics looked bad.

Since then he said he’s had an almost universal policy of having defendants draw alternates. Legal experts said that might be unconventional, but not necessarily wrong. Schroeder said he hasn’t had any complaints in this case, and suggested that those who were dissatisfied were trying to undermine the results of the trial.

Five schools in Kenosha are going virtual this week over concerns for the safety of staff and students due to the schools’ proximity to the Kenosha County Courthouse.

These include Brass Elementary, Frank Elementary School, Harborside Academy, Reuther Central High School and Washington Middle School, reported ABC-affiliate WISN.

“While we have not been advised of any existing imminent danger, we feel this is the best course of action to protect our students and staff during an uncertain time. We will continue to work closely with law enforcement to receive support as needed in the days and weeks ahead,” said Kenosha Unified School District in a message to parents cited by the TV news station.

As the judge presiding over Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial came under scrutiny once again for allowing Mr Rittenhouse to pick the names of the six jurors, a defence attorney practicing in Kenosha court for 54 years said that this is how the judge normally conducts himself.

“It’s not just because it’s Kyle Rittenhouse, he does this in everybody’s case,” Terry Rose, told ABC affiliate WKOW.

“There is nothing wrong with it,” Mr Rose, said of judge Bruce Schroeder’s decision to allow Rittenhouse the draw the alternate jurors names out in his murder trial. “It does not tilt the case either way. When a defendant sticks his hand in the cylinder, pulls out a piece of paper, he can’t see what’s on that paper.”

Right-wing political commentator Dinesh D’Souza told Fox News on Wednesday that Kyle Rittenhouse’s homicide trial is being portrayed as “a kind of symbol of the Trump movement”.

“This isn’t just a trial about Rittenhouse,” he said. “In fact the prosecution early on was very eager to show him fraternising or associating with the Proud Boys.

“They wanted to try to make Rittenhouse a symbol for Trump’s America. By contrast, the rioters, the looters, the arsonists — this is Antifa. These are the people that the media has protected for a year.

“And if you were to read media accounts of this confrontation, you would never get a sense of who these people are or what these people were doing or the violence they were engaging in or the fact that they chased Kyle Rittenhouse and not the other way around.”

Claiming that assistant district attorney Thomas Binger is acting as “the apologist for the left-wing narrative,” D’Souza said: “They want to get Rittenhouse because they want him to be a stand-in, if you will, for the whole Make America Great Again movement.”