This is an odious comparison, but one could make the same argument about joining the Nazi party in 1930s Germany. Furthermore, considering the Republican stance on climate change, I’m not actually sure which would be worse.
400 years from now, there are only two things today’s US government has great power over that will have mattered; whether there is a large scale nuclear war, and whether there was devastating climate change. The Republican party is directly making the second problem much worse.
Civilization recovered from the Black Plague, World War II, and the Mongol invasions (which killed about as many people as World War II when the world’s population was a lot smaller). I do not know if it can recover from severe climate change caused by either nuclear winter or greenhouse gas emissions.
The worst case scenario for climate change is worse than you think—it’s not simply massive famines, millions of refugees, and geopolitical instability. It’s a replay of the Great Dying, the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history. And it was caused by greenhouse gases released by volcanoes and the burning of underground carbon deposits caused by those same volcanoes. Warming temperatures caused the ocean circulation that brings oxygen from the ocean’s surface to its depths to slow down, creating the conditions for anerobic bacteria to thrive: anerobic bacteria that produce the poisonous gas hydrogen sulfide, and they produced enough to make the entire atmosphere lethally toxic. The worst possible climate change scenario doesn’t just mean there’s not enough food for everyone, it means taking off your gas mask will kill you.
When it comes right down to it, I’d vote for Hitler over a climate change denialist—and I’m Jewish!
If your benchtop device user can modify the hardware to attempt to defeat the screening mechanism, the problem becomes orders of magnitude harder. I imagine that making a DNA sequence generating device that can’t be modified to make smallpox even if it’s in the middle of Pyongyang and the malicious user is the North Korean government is an essentially unsolvable problem—if nothing else, they can try to reverse engineer the device and build a similar one without any screening mechanism at all.