It’s a sign of the times that Bill Maher now sounds like a voice of reason and moderation on the Left rather than a hyper-partisan bomb-thrower.

In recent months, the snarky, sharp-tongued hater of all things conservative has been forced into this new role not by a shift in his thinking but by a shift in the thinking of his lifelong ideological soulmates. These days, on one issue after another, the Democrats are simply bonkers, and Maher has been forced to call them out — whether the topic is abortion or illegal immigration or wokeism or transgenderism or equity or free speech or media bias or Hollywood or cancel culture or black-on-black crime. We could go on.

And today, thanks to lefty rocker John Cougar Mellencamp, we can add slavery to that ever-growing list.

Mellencamp, who fancies himself a heartlander but who once sat on his privileged fanny during the playing of our national anthem prior to a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Philadelphia Eagles, was the featured guest on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast. For those of you who have better things to do than slog through the entire two-hour profanity-laced conversation, we’ll pick it up at the 28:56 mark:

When the conversation came to race, as it invariably does with leftists, Mellencamp noted that he’d written a song called “From the Cotton Field to the Playing Fields” that he never recorded because he thought “it was wrong.”

Mellencamp then said, “Us white people love to have black people entertain us.” That gets to the point of the song, which was an attempt to show how whites often exploited blacks in that way. (Personally, we’d love to be “exploited” like Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan or LeBron James or Denzel Washington or Will Smith or Chris Rock or Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson or Halle Berry or Queen Latifah or countless other multimillionaire exploitees, but we digress.)

“I would say,” Maher replied, “that the playing fields are a lot better than the cotton fields. That’s what I would say about that. Maybe I’m crazy, John, but it seems like making no money as a slave picking cotton — it was not as good as playing left field for the Yankees.”

To which Mellencamp opined, “No doubt there is one or two percent of black people in America who have a better life.”

Maher, to his credit, challenged Mellencamp immediately, who then backpedaled: “Okay, let’s say 10%. I just pulled a number out of my a**.”

“That’s where it belongs,” said Maher, who lives in the reality-based world in which today’s black community is certainly not without its well-documented troubles but whose comparison to the enslaved blacks of yore is a profoundly ignorant insult — an insult only utterable by a wealthy white leftist.

We’d imagine that more than a few blacks took exception to Mellencamp’s comments. One of them, noted black “conservatarian” Zeek Arkham, whose pronouns are “bruh” and “brutha,” had this to say about the idiotic utterance:

My great-grandfather grew up in a one room house in North Carolina. Literally one room. The kitchen, living room, and bedrooms were all in the same room. They had to go outside to use the bathroom. He used to tell me he felt proud when he was actually able to own a house with an actual bedroom.

Good to know Mellencamp thinks I live in the same conditions as my great-granddad.

I swear, some White Liberals truly do consider Black folks to be subhuman creatures they have to come and save in order for us to get a piece of humanity.

Over the course of two hours, one can only imagine the ground that Maher and Mellencamp covered, and it included a stop at rap music, which Mellencamp denounced … for its use of racial slurs. “That’s what I have against — not against — but, you know, why I’m not a big fan of rap music. It’s like, you guys are selling out what the people stood up for and fought for, and you’re making money off of it selling it to white kids?”

So onerous and demeaning comparisons of modern-day blacks to slaves are just fine with Mellencamp, but, please, no racial slurs. Such stuff is just beyond the pale.