I wouldn't be surprised if there were planted agents, but you don't need them these days. The school system and economic/social structure are generating these "new atheist" fanboys like they're going out of style. Reddit is a downvoting beehive storm of them.
Firstly it's a well deserved counter to the dominance of religious dogma over the past. They're pissed off and rejecting religious programming, as they well should! The problem is they're throwing the baby out with the bath water and rejecting all spiritualism (a belief that everything is one, which even in the physical model is true even if you're only including gravity. In the social model it should also be true: to hurt someone else is to hurt yourself.)
It's hip to be cynical these days and to worship science as if scientists are rock stars and not just fallible human beings who misrepresent their results in favor of personal biases as readily as any other field. (Even though anyone who looks below the surface would know that the material realist model is COMPLETELY busted and not just by quantum physics' 'observer' premise {is it really the observer affecting the experiment or is it the detector?})
It's like these guys are still cheering about the Newtonian model and don't even realize 'new' science is tearing it all down. And how does the 'physical model' (consciousness arose as an epiphenomenon of matter rather than consciousness came first and created the matter that we now know to be mostly empty space and probability patterns) allow them to throw out telepathy, UFOs, paranormal stuff, higher consciousness, intelligent design? I mean, just because you have faith that the universe is matter you can throw out not only the gods, but any evidence that makes you uncomfortable just because it's experiential knowledge or not easily reproducible in a lab? (and if you're honest with yourself, you'd realize ALL knowledge is subjectively interpreted and we can't prove an objective universe outside of ourselves at all.)
How do we know that pain medicine is working? We give some to someone and ask, does this hurt? How else could we know what love is? But if we ask alien abductees what happened to them we can throw that evidence out because we've already decided how the universe works. Really, son? You know how many times we've been proven to be idiots in the history of science? We used to think crossing the sound barrier would kill us. You see how big that universe is in comparison to us? You really think we're the pinnacle of conscious intelligence?
Capitalism loves the new atheism. It makes us all victims of causality instead of co-creators. It means we can shut down our imaginations because thoughts are just these extra fluffy things that don't really matter. It means we don't have to 'clean house' inside of our heads because our thoughts are a private room where we can do as we please and make a mess and it won't affect the world. Or will it?
If you believe everything is material then you believe our thoughts are material as well, stored in our brains in chemical and electrical configurations. Here I can make a thought move a million atoms *waves my arm* not impressed? I can give a thought to you and it might replicate and seek out other similar thoughts like a virus. I might have done so already. They love to pick on invisible pink unicorns, but if my belief in invisible unicorns has a behavioral effect (I step over every door threshold so as not to step on them) then my THOUGHT IS AFFECTING REALITY and if I started a unicorn worshiping cult you can bet your ass those thoughts would be real and would affect the real world.
So what delusion would you prefer? One where you pretend that there's nothing that goes bump in the night? One where there's demons and angels around every corner? One where we're all meaningless randomly generated robots in a selfish meaningless universe dominated by survival-of-the-fittest?
We're all just making choices. Why they act like sheepdogs for their beliefs is another issue entirely. Here's a clue as to why: fear of uncertainty.