Issue solved! Hours of BS later.

When you turn on the theme you can go to that “Welcome to Newspaper!” section. On this page there is the system status stuff on the right side. The theme says “they recommend” a certain PHP setting or WP memory limit. It does not say this is required to run the theme, its just yellow and not red text. But my td_composer refused to activate until I made the changes they had in the status. These should not be “recommended” but “required” if they are actually required to use the theme. I don’t know which one it was but seems to be working now that all 4 have green checkmarks.

I have been fighting with this thing for an hour now, I have narrowed it down to td_composer. If I try to activate this plugin it kills the whole site. I uploaded the zip file from theme forest and did a manual activation same problem. The auto install says “Ajax Error” every time I try that and also kills the site. All I can do to recover is delete the td_composer folder from the plugins folder to make the site work again.