Brand new Hot end not heating correctly

Here’s a doozy. I recently had a petg print fail while I was away and my hotend assembly on my ender 3 V2 was filled with filament. I was able to heat it up and peel away a lot of the filament at first but somewhere along the way I pulled the two small wires attached to the screw on the hot end (which I’m assuming are the thermistor wires) out with some filament. My printer now freezes up when I go to heat the nozzle. I purchased a new hot end from creality because there was too much hard plastic to replace the thermistor wires. I had to replace all the wiring for the hot end as well. Now two more problems arise. First, with all the wiring plugged in as I found it the machine gets stuck on the boot up screen. I found that if I unplug the white wire at the top of the stack on the motherboard I can get past that screen but I get the same old issue when trying to heat the nozzle. Does the top plug control the thermistor? Why is it freezing with everything plugged in correctly?