No. The amendment wasn't meaningless and did provide some protection of citizens' basic rights against infringement by state governments.
Right, but not wholesale incorporation of the BOR.
There is nothing in the congressional debates around the 14th Amendment that suggest incorporation.
I think the 14th amendment was not ratified by a legitimate process and that it was not very well worded for what it attempted to do.
I dislike many ways in which the court has used it's "incorporation doctrine" to bully states into doing things the court wanted to impose on them, but the idea that freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms should be "optional" is something I very much don't want to accept.
So this "incorporation doctrine" thing has done some good things. The question is whether the good it has done is worth the harm it has done.
We got Abortion on Demand from it. We got Anchor Babies out of it. We banned prayer in public schools because of it. We rewrote the qualifications for president to allow anchor babies. We got "Wickard" out of it. We got "Gay" marriage out of it.
We got a host of nefarious and destructive ideas imposed on us out of the incorporation doctrine.
What a mess.
"We have held from the beginning and uniformly that the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply to the States any of the provisions of the first ten amendments as such."
"The relevant historical materials demonstrate conclusively that Congress and the members of the legislatures of the ratifying States did not contemplate that the 14th Amendment was a shorthand incorporation of the first eight amendments making them applicable as explicit restrictions upon the States."
Bartkus v. Illinois 359 US 121, 124 (1959)