The sad thing is they think bad things start and end with one man and not at all a result of ignoring all the shit your country does without consequences.
No, rare earth minerals are a class of minerals. They are actually very common, but they are expensive to refine because they normally don't accumulate in high-yield lodes or ore bands like iron, nickel, cobalt and gold, they are just sparsely distributed among other geological mediums, and so you have to process shitloads of material to extract tiny percentages of them. Therefore the places where they are naturally concentrated higher are quite sought after.