Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
A Brief History of Powerful Men Grafting Things Onto Themselves
There is a particular species of man who, upon feeling the first cold draft of irrelevance, will do absolutely anything to prove he’s still got it. Sew monkey parts into his body. Bomb a sovereign nation. Misplace a few hundred pages of FBI interview notes. Whatever it takes. The through-line connecting a French surgeon in the 1920s to the American president in 2026 is not ideology or ambition or even garden-variety narcissism. It is the white-hot terror of being seen as weak, and the spectacular lengths to which men will go to make sure nobody looks too closely at what they’ve been doing with their hands.
Dr. Voronoff and the Golden Age of Scrotal Confidence
In 1920, Dr. Serge Voronoff, a Russian-born French surgeon with the bedside manner of a carnival barker and the client list of a luxury car dealership, performed the first chimpanzee-testicle-to-human-testicle transplant. The procedure involved slicing a young chimp’s testicle into thin strips and sewing them directly into the scrotum of a 74-year-old man who presumably had nothing else going on that afternoon.
Voronoff promised the grafts would reverse aging, cure senility, boost memory, and restore sexual vigor. Basically the same pitch as every supplement ad running on podcasts right now, except Voronoff had the decency to use actual primate parts instead of mushroom powder.
A quick taxonomic note: the animals were chimpanzees, not monkeys. Chimps are apes. But the press called them “monkey glands” because “ape testicles” presumably tested poorly with readers, and Voronoff himself became known as “the monkey gland expert.” So even the branding was a lie. We are one paragraph into this man’s career and already the marketing doesn’t match the product. Remember that. It comes back.
And people bought it. Not just random people. Rich people. Powerful people. The kind of men who owned things and ran things and needed everyone to know they could still run things. By 1927, Voronoff claimed more than a thousand procedures had been performed worldwide. He charged the equivalent of a year’s salary per surgery. He bought a castle on the Italian Riviera, built a primate enclosure in the garden, and hired a former circus animal trainer to manage his personal monkey farm. This is not a metaphor. This actually happened. A man built a monkey ranch on the Mediterranean coast so that aging millionaires could sew pieces of chimpanzee into their bodies and pretend time wasn’t winning.
Seven Hundred Scientists Clapped
Here is the part that should make you set down your coffee. In 1923, Voronoff presented his work at the International Congress of Surgeons in London. Over 700 scientists attended. They were, by most accounts, impressed. The medical establishment did not laugh this man out of the room. They nodded. They took notes. Some of them signed up.
This is the pattern, and it is older than democracy. A powerful or charismatic figure makes an outrageous claim. The institutions that are supposed to provide guardrails instead provide applause. And the few people raising their hands to say, “Hey, quick question, are we sure about the monkey testicles?” get drowned out by the sound of checkbooks opening.
The procedures continued for two decades. Between 1920 and 1940, roughly 2,000 men had chimp tissue grafted into their bodies across multiple countries. Voronoff eventually expanded his practice to include transplanting chimp ovaries into women. He even tried to inseminate a chimpanzee with human sperm. The experiment failed, which is the first piece of genuinely good news in this entire story.
Meanwhile, in 2026, We Are Doing the Same Thing but With Missiles
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under the adorably named Operation Epic Fury. The stated purpose was regime change. The opening salvo killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, several senior military officials, and, a few days later, Khamenei’s wife, who died of injuries sustained in the initial strike. President Trump released an eight-minute video statement explaining that this was all very necessary because Iran’s “menacing activities” endangered the United States and its allies. He cited the Iran hostage crisis. From 1979. So we’re working through some things.
The buildup had been underway for weeks. In January, Trump announced that a “massive armada” was heading to the Middle East. Two aircraft carrier groups. Guided-missile destroyers. Submarines. The largest American military presence in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, you may recall, was also sold on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. American intelligence reports in 2026 suggested that Iran’s alleged long-range ballistic missile threat was, to use the technical term, unfounded. Didn’t matter. The armada was already floating.
The Voronoff Principle: If You Can’t Actually Fix It, Make a Bigger Show
Voronoff’s patients didn’t get younger. The chimp tissue was eventually reabsorbed or rejected by the body. The “rejuvenation” was placebo, confirmation bias, and the intoxicating rush of having done something extreme. But none of that mattered because the performance was the point. You walked into a castle on the Riviera. A former circus trainer brought you a chimpanzee. A famous surgeon cut you open and sewed something foreign into the most intimate part of your body. You walked out feeling like a new man. And if anyone questioned the results, well, 700 scientists clapped.
Operation Epic Fury follows the same logic. The intelligence doesn’t support the threat assessment? Launch the armada anyway. The last time we did this exact thing in the Middle East it destabilized an entire region for a generation? This time will be different because this time the video statement is eight minutes long.
Trump told the Iranian people to “take over your government” after he finished bombing it, which has roughly the same energy as a surgeon handing you a scalpel and saying, “You take it from here, the monkey’s already inside you.”
The Files That Aren’t There
While the bombs were falling and the press was doing its breathless play-by-play of Operation We Definitely Thought This Through, another story was quietly doing what inconvenient stories do in wartime: disappearing.
In January 2026, the Department of Justice released 3.5 million pages of Jeffrey Epstein files in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This was supposed to be the big reveal. The curtain pull. The moment we finally got to see the full scope of what a convicted child sex trafficker and his network of powerful friends had been up to for decades.
Except the files had holes in them. Not small holes. Not accidental holes. Holes in the exact shape of things you’d want to hide if you were, say, the sitting president.
NPR’s investigation found that approximately 53 pages of FBI interview documents and notes were missing from the public database. Among the absent files were three of four interview summaries from a woman who told the FBI that Epstein had repeatedly abused her starting when she was approximately 13 years old. She also accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her. The one interview summary that was released detailed her accusations against Epstein. The ones involving Trump were gone.
The DOJ’s official response was that they hadn’t deleted anything and that all responsive documents were produced. Documents not included were either “duplicates, privileged, or part of an ongoing federal investigation.” This is the bureaucratic equivalent of a magician saying the card was never in the deck to begin with while you can clearly see it sticking out of his sleeve.
Castles, Islands, and Places Where the Rules Don’t Apply
Voronoff built his castle in Grimaldi, Italy. It had a primate farm, a private hospital, and a former circus employee on payroll. It was a self-contained world where a man could do things that would be questioned anywhere else. He could slice up chimps and sew their parts into millionaires and call it science, and nobody within the castle walls was going to tell him otherwise.
Jeffrey Epstein owned an island. And a ranch. And a townhouse in Manhattan. Plus, a home in Palm Beach. These were self-contained worlds where a man could do things that would be questioned anywhere else. We know this because we have tens of thousands of images, thousands of videos, and six million pages of documents confirming it.
Donald Trump has Mar-a-Lago. A 128-room private club in Palm Beach where a president can store classified documents in a bathroom, host foreign dignitaries next to the pool bar, conduct war strategy over dinner, and maintain the kind of orbit where everyone within the walls works for you and nobody asks uncomfortable questions. It’s not a castle on the Italian Riviera and it’s not a private island in the Caribbean, but it serves the same architectural purpose: a place where the rules that apply to everyone else dissolve at the gate.
Well. 3.5 million pages. Half of the six million. With 53 particularly interesting pages missing.
The pattern holds across a century. Powerful men build private spaces where accountability cannot reach them. They surround themselves with people paid to look the other way. And when the walls eventually come down, the most damaging evidence has a funny habit of not being where it’s supposed to be.
The Super-Sheep Problem
My favorite detail in the entire Voronoff saga is the sheep. Voronoff didn’t just graft monkey testicles onto aging millionaires. He also administered the procedure to young sheep, claiming it created a race of super-sheep with increased size, strength, and wool production. He then speculated, publicly and without apparent irony, that performing the same procedure on young humans might produce a race of super-men. Giants. Possibly immortal.
This is the logical endpoint of the strongman fantasy. It is not enough to restore what you had. You must become something more. Something superhuman. Something that cannot be questioned or challenged or held accountable because it is too big, too strong, too powerful.
Trump floated “off ramps” to reporters two days into the bombing campaign, telling Axios he could “go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days.” This is the language of a man who wants you to know that he is in total control. That this is his to give or take. That the size and duration of the war are functions of his will, not of strategy or intelligence or the lives of the people underneath the bombs.
Meanwhile, the Epstein Files Transparency Act explicitly states that no record shall be withheld on the basis of “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” And yet. The 53 pages remain missing. The DOJ says everything is fine. And the House Oversight Committee says it will investigate, just as soon as it finishes deposing Hillary Clinton, because priorities.
What the Monkey Knew
Voronoff died in 1951, wealthy and completely discredited. The testosterone he’d been trying to transplant was eventually synthesized in a lab, rendering his monkey farms and castle hospitals and scalpel work moot. His legacy is a cocktail named after him, a South African steak sauce, and the enduring lesson that if you dress up nonsense in enough confidence and institutional validation, you can get away with it for decades.
The procedures didn’t work. The patients didn’t get younger. The sheep were not super. The only thing Voronoff actually proved was that there is no limit to what powerful men will submit to, pay for, or inflict on others in pursuit of the feeling that they are still in charge.
I think about the chimps sometimes. They didn’t volunteer for any of this. They were brought to a castle, managed by a circus trainer, and carved up so that old men could pretend they’d cheated death. Nobody asked the chimps if the science was sound. Nobody needed to. The chimps were not the audience.
Neither, for the record, are we.
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His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- When God Closes a Door, He Needs to Go Get Some Paprika - March 5, 2026
- Monkey Testicles, Missing Documents, and the Eternal Quest to Stay on Top - March 3, 2026
- Under the Blood Worm Moon, Nobody Has to Learn Anything - March 3, 2026
