If Richard Nixon's 1969 speech was a call to the "great silent majority" to rise up and take a more active role in American politics, Mario Savio was the type of person that he wanted to sit down and stop making noise about American politics.

He would have been in Nixon's "lame loud minority."

Savio was one of the most important figures in the 1960s counterculture movement, and especially in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

When the University of California, Berkeley banned all political activity and fundraising, Savio and thousands of other students saw what they argued was an act of authoritarian injustice. So, they protested the whole situation.

During one of the protests, Savio stood up like a total boss and gave this speech to the crowd of students, administrators, and reporters. In the speech, Savio basically called the people who ran the university a bunch of hacks.

He said that the university acted like a heartless and monstrous machine that just chewed up students and spat them out. Which wasn't very nice. A lot of people felt that this represented their university experiences and actually kind of represented massive bureaucracies as a whole. As a result, this message became a powerful symbol of the 1960s.

Also as a result, it became a powerful symbol of everything that Richard Nixon didn't like about the 1960s.