I figured it out, I ended up going through every ACL that starts with sc_, was active, and was a read operation. Anything that had the role "catalog_admin" i changed to public, one at a time. It finally started working on the last one I changed over, which then meant it could have been any combination of the ones I turned on. So I turned each one off one by one to make sure it still worked.

Here is the culprit:

sc_cat_item_producer [read]

change catalog_admin to public or something and it'll work.

I'm going to take a nice long nap now.