The Southern Poverty Law Center, through its Teaching Tolerance program, has encouraged schools across the U.S. to hold a "Mix It Up at Lunch" day in order to encourage students to break up cliques and prevent bullying. In late 2012, the AFA called the project – begun 11 years earlier and held in more than 2,500 schools – "a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools", urging parents to keep their children home from school on October 30, 2012, and to call the schools to protest the event. "I was surprised that they completely lied about what Mix It Up Day is", Maureen Costello, the director of the center's Teaching Tolerance project, which organizes the program, told "The New York Times". "It was a cynical, fear-mongering tactic." In October, Bryan Fischer was taken off air during a CNN interview with Carol Costello for repeating his belief that "Hitler recruited homosexuals around him to make up his Stormtroopers."