@angus - I have done a site refresh, theme update, plugin shuffle, etc. I discovered the issue and it was very hard to find. The theme we are using (a highly modified Zox News theme) had an update on the parent theme that somehow was updated along with the other plugins.
The child theme did not handle that well. Zox News theme has a place for Disqus integration and completely overrides the standard WP Comment HTML structures. I had to edit the parent theme to prevent it from displaying a comment button and basically high-jacking the WP Discourse code injection that was looking for the WP Comments structure (that was no longer there).
The site is still somewhat messy on the backend, but I will be cleaning it up through the weekend.
Here is a chunk of code that caused the issue:
<!-- DELETE THIS from post-single.php in parent theme -->
<!-- <div id="mvp-comments-button" class="left relative mvp-com-click">
<span class="mvp-comment-but-text"><?php comments_number(__( 'Click to comment', 'zox-news'), esc_html__('1 Comment', 'zox-news'), esc_html__('% Comments', 'zox-news'));?></span>
</div>-->
<!--mvp-comments-button-->
I’ve tested with about 5 different posts turning comments off or on. So far, things are okay. I’ll mark a solution if things go well through the weekend/week.
Thanks again, everyone!!!