The New Atheist wave, notable for its aggressive rhetoric, was in no small part a response to the shenanigans of the Creationists who had a long record in the US of trying to get Creationism taught in state schools, not least in science classes. The Dover trial 2005 which rejected another attempt to have "intelligent design" ─ essentially creationism in a new dress ─ taught in schools proved to be the crest of their wave, and they're more subdued these days even if they haven't gone away.
This is true. It was in a sense meeting force with force, violence with violence, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. In a lot of ways, to say something positive for it, that is empowering in a sense to call stupidity stupidity. I admit taking some pleasure in that myself.
But extremes are extremes, on either end of the spectrum. The positive side of this is that when you look at society as a bell curve, the center of it has the most people, whereas the edges has the fewest. The most vocal voices are in the minority, as they try to pull society one way or the other. So the positive thing they do is to get dialog happening in the middle. In a true sense, they have done their job.
The negative side of this is, that when the middle actually starts to look at these things and consider them with clearer minds and cooler heads, the radicals can't hear them. All they know is their enemies on the far extreme opposite edges they are doing battle with. So someone who is moderate, is lumped in with them, "Woo Woo!!", is hurled at anyone who tries to see what value there is in theism, for instance. I know this in spades by personal experience.
So while New Atheism/Anti-Theism is on the 'rationalist' side, its inability to engage in actual dialog betrays itself as just as emotional and reactionary, irrational, as the theistic funamentalists. Fundamentalism is not rationality. It's reactionary.
New Atheism, I think, has followed militant creationism out of fashion, though of course neither has completely disappeared.
Maybe this is a good sign? However, we certainly have a share of them here.